Backing up VirtualBox VMs

My first thought is that you shouldn't use Virtualbox as a server platform; it's great for desktop workstations, but as a server, you might want to look at the VMWare ESXi or hypervisor from XenSource, both free. I use it on a Dell 2950 (the ESXi solution), and you can copy things from the management interface on a Windows machine or run Veeam to copy it over. Also if you decide to up the management side with a budget you can upgrade (at a high price, admittedly) to allow for things like live migration between two servers and better backup options.

We're right now virtualizing 7 servers. There are some vendors that won't support virtualization...Exchange isn't supported, nor is Oracle, for example, but it can be done.

We had one system running with an SQL database (a point of sale) that gave horrible performance when running under VMWare Server (Linux host, Windows guest) and we couldn't keep it virtualized long enough to troubleshoot it due to the hardship it placed on the users, so it was put on a physical system again. ESXi is the bare-metal type-one hypervisor and may give enough of a performance boost to handle it though (no plans to try it out).

You may need to try it out to find out how well it works for your set of circumstances. We love it. It's lowered power requirements in our server room, we can back up the system state over the weekend, and it has helped monitor performance as well as helped with recovery plans should something happen to our server.

You can assemble relatively inexpensive ESXi systems following guidelines from sites like here and here. It is very picky about hardware support; you'll want to look at the HCL to make sure you have something that works out of box or the whitebox sites for things that were tested.

Try this:

1. Setup the virtualbox to use 2 adapters:
   • The first adapter is set to NAT (that will give you the internet connection).
   • The second adapter is set to host only.
2. Start the virtual machine and assign a static IP for the second adapter in Ubuntu (for instance 192.168.56.56). The host Windows will have 192.168.56.1 as IP for the internal network (VirtualBox Host-Only Network is the name in network connections in Windows). What this will give you is being able to access the apache server on ubuntu, from windows, by going to 192.168.56.56. Also, Ubuntu will have internet access, since the first adapter (set to NAT) will take care of that.
3. Now, to make the connection available both ways (accessing the windows host from the ubuntu guest) there's still one more step to be performed. Windows will automatically add the virtualbox host-only network to the list of public networks and that cannot be changed. This entails that the firewall will prevent proper access.
4. To overcome this and not make any security breaches in your setup:
   • go to the windows firewall section, in control panel,
   • click on advanced settings. In the page that pops up,
   • click on inbound rules (left column), then on new rule (right column). Chose custom rule, set the rule to allow all programs, and any protocol. For the scope, add in the first box (local IP addresses) 192.168.56.1, and in the second box (remote IP) 192.168.56.56. Click next, select allow the connection, next, check all profiles, next, give it a name and save.

That's it, now you have 2 way communication, with apache/any other service available as well as internet. The final step is to setup a share. Do not use the shared folders feature in virtualbox, it's quite buggy especially with windows 7 (and 64 bit). Instead use samba shares - fast and efficient.

Follow this link for how to set that up: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MountWindowsSharesPermanently