DEVELOPER FORAY: get a system going for having a library of ubuntu and win7 machines in virtualbox | 4.5 





added on May 27, 2012 | permalink
Get a system going for having a library of ubuntu and win7 machines in virtualbox
- goal: to make it easy to save states of virtual machines, move them, etc.
- opening and changing current ubuntu
- made a file and saved with window open
- closed machine
- I can't change the machine while saved (like vmware)
- found the virtual disk image at: C:\Users\Edward\VirtualBox VMs\Ubuntu\Ubuntu.vdi
- copying it over to external drive
- creating new machine
- when adding the virtual drive on F:, it says that it can't read it, but then I continued and it worked
- renaming to Ubuntu_base001.vdi to see if I can still load it
- (you can change the file, file, global...)
- discarded saved state from first machine
- two machines have the same drive, testing if I can change one and it changes the other
- first machine made file, turned off
- when I tried to take a screenshot, it said "failed to create":

- getting the update to 4.1.16
- it installed a number of devices (usb etc.)
- said I had an old version of virtualbox extension pack and installed, quick
- started machine 1 again
- got error again:
- Failed to create a snapshot of the virtual machine Ubuntu.
- starting as admin
- tried renaming the hard drive and using it on the same machine but you cannot because they have guids, even after I deleted the first:

- creating a new machine and trying to use the renamed drive from another machine, doesn't work:

- trying to use the drive on another machine, no, doesn't work:

- zipping whole machine and moving it
- renamed drive back to original and started ubuntu1, worked
- zipping whole vm directory (C:\Users\Edward\VirtualBox VMs\Ubuntu), interseting: zipped all files including 3GB down to 1GB zip
- copied, extracting...
- interesting, even though I deleted the disk, just because it was open on the machine, it says it cannot add one with the same UUID

- ok, went into the virtual media manager and deleted it
- did a copy virtual disk, created it
- started copied machine and it says it doesn't have usb 2.0 controller
- tried to install extension pack but got error "exptected 4.0 got 4.1" (ok, just downloaded wrong one, installing was easy, from website)
- nice, it copied fine
- so: ubuntu machines are able to be created and copied
- took a snapshot on the second machine and it worked
- installing guest additions (ran autorun.sh), installed, made two shared folders, one a plain name, and one at /home/edward/test222, rebooting,
- creating instructions for creating new Ubuntu machines:
- trying to get two ubuntu machines running one
- right click, clone, then:

- full clone
- takes about 3 minutes to clone

- how to create a new ubuntu machine
- unzip file on external drive
- copy the machines directory to hard drive
- start machine
- use this machine to clone other machines and rename
- NEXT: Create and store win7 machine, done
- NEXT: Create and store winxp machine