Virtual Box is amazing for an open source project. It comes close to VMWare in usability. Where it falls short is importing and exporting images. There's no support in the user interface for this. If you feel comfortable using the command line, you can export and import a disk image. Here's how,
To export:
- Shut down the VM
- Use the "VBoxManager clonevdi ..." CLI to copy the disk image. On my Mac this was at /usr/bin/vboxmanage
To import:
- Register the disk image: File>Virtual Disk Manager>Add
- Create a new VM, and use the disk image you added in step 1
The obvious problem is that the .vdi file is just a disk image. It doesn't capture the virtual machine. You must know the correct parameters to use when you create the VM in the import process or the disk image won't be able to run. It also doesn't capture the state of the virtual machine.
Vbox has a very nice snapshot feature. If one could import / export snapshots it would be perfect.
Thank you for this information. The only thing that I do think that one of us might be able to accomplish is creating the module that would automate the import or exporting of VBox. It also might be a good idea to create a converter that would create/convert your desktop into a vbox machine or convert a VMware image. That would be even more nice.
Posted by dfrancis on August 05, 2008 at 08:34 PM PDT #