Dear InnoTek, I was quite excited when I read on heise.de that an open source virtualization application has been released which can be compared to commercial products like VMware!
The installation went smoothly on Windows XP and Linux. However when I first created a virtual machine I recognized an architectural difference of VirtualBox compared to VMware which - in my opinion - is counterproductive for a virtualization application: 1) Virtual machines need to be placed at a specific location 2) Virtual machines are separated over two directories (Machines and VDI) While the second point also yields advantages (using the same disk image for several machines) both points are hindering for my concern: the portability of virtual machines. One of the greatest advantage of virtual machines is the independence of the guest system to the host system. I usually store my virtual machines on an USB medium, take them along and use them on different computers where the virtualization application is installed. The problem with VirtualBox is that it cannot open a VM from *any* location. I have to copy them to the correct path or change the path in the configuration dialog accordingly first. If I change the path where VirtualBox is looking for VMs another problem is that this path may change (e.g. another drive letter on Windows) if the VMs are placed on a portable medium. I know it's possible to import a VM via "VBoxManage registervm" but asides the restrictions of this command (quote from the manual: "it may not have any hard or removable disks attached") this is not very "plug & play". My researches also revealed that a VM which has been created in Windows can not be used in Linux and vice versa without modifying the configuration files first (absolute paths, version property of the <VirtualBox> root tag). The fact that all disk images are managed in the users VirtualBox.xml file is another problem for portable VMs. I would like to see some changes in a future version of VirtualBox so that I can be used as follows: 1) Plug in a portable device 2) Open a VM from the portable device 3) Use it! My suggestions to reach this goal are, if a machine has been tagged as "portable" it should: 1) Store all its files in one folder (and sub folders) 2) Only use relative paths in its configuration file(s) 3) Not mind if the machine has been created with another OS 4) Refer to disk images not via an uuid but with a relative path -- Sincerely Sven Jacobs _______________________________________________ vbox-users mailing list [email protected] http://vbox.innotek.de/mailman/listinfo/vbox-users
