[vbox-dev] Best way to move a vm to another pc?

[S. Brandt]

walt schrieb:
> On 09/19/2009 05:00 PM, Huihong Luo wrote:
>> Thanks, walt.
>> Yes, that will work, provided the drive letter and directory hierarchy
>> keep exactly same on different PCs, because absolute paths are used in
>> those xml files...
> 
> Hm, yes, I see that you're right.  I never noticed that before.
> 
> I'm guessing (I'm not one of the devs) that this may have to do with
> security, but that's only a guess.  Maybe one of the devs would tell
> us why absolute paths are used?
Hi!
The soft link solution, of course, does not work at all on windows ...

There is a similar situation, apart from "moving" the vms around.
In our students pool, we need a single vm to be usable by all persons
who log into a certain XP machine (one at a time, of course, it's XP).
In this case, for running 32bit software on 64bit XP.

Yet, we have not found a way to use the same machine by different logged
in users, either.
* the main settings are in the user's profile\virtualbox.xml
* you cannot register a vm with a saved state for another user
* you can re-use the same disk for another vm, of course, but saved
states and snapshots get lost; you create "branches", thus running into
invalid situations (hopefully, they are detected correctly).

It might be possible with a primary read-only disk which never gets
changed; but then, every user has to install all windows patches etc.
her/himself.

The only solution:
Use one user for all ...

Anyone an idea in this context?

The best solution, for both cases, might be to make the location of the
virtualbox.xml main registry file configurable, and make it use relativ
paths whereever possible.

For the moving case - you can of course patch the virtualbox.xml by hand ...

Yours,
Sebastian