Virtual Machine (Sun’s VirtualBox) to a real PC

v2pvirtual-machinesvirtualbox

I would like to create a virutal machine that I could clone to real computers (about 40) (every computer have the same configuration: MOBO, Video, Drivers).

I have to use Sun's VirtualBox.

Is there any way to do this?

Best Answer

The answer is "maybe", but not telling us the operating system, that's where I will leave the answer.

Personally, if I had 40 identical boxes, I would use one of them as the progenitor.

Edit: The terms you want to search for are "physicalization" or "V2P".

Related Solutions

Virtualbox booting from a real drive

Is it possible to use Virtualbox to boot from that old real drive instead of from an image?

Yes. VirtualBox has support for using a raw host hard disk from a guest since version 1.4. As of version 2.2.0, it is still listed as an experimental feature. It is described in section 9.10 of the user manual for VirtualBox 2.2.0.

There are some instructions for running a WindowsXP guest using a raw host hard disk on a linux host:

If so, what are the implications for drivers, etc, since the "new" running OS will be using VirtualBox's virtual hardware and not the original hardware on which XP thinks it was installed.

The second link above describes some steps to prepare your XP system prior to booting under VirtualBox.

virtualbox – Creating a Virtual Machine from a Physical One

Windows is a bit different, see How to migrate existing Windows installations to VirtualBox for a guide.

From memory you can use VMware's converter and VirtualBox will read VMDK files.

For Linux, if you want the easy solution, boot a live CD,

dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/path/to/images/sda1.img bs=1024

Do that for every partition mounted in /etc/fstab of your machine, and then setup those images in VirtualBox.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Virtualbox booting from a real drive

virtualbox – Creating a Virtual Machine from a Physical One

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