Virtual Machines Portable?

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djnes

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I was under the impression that virtual machines were meant to be portable across different computers. I also see this in the fact you can download many virtual machines, ready to go. So, that leads to my question.

If I were to create an XP virtual machine in Virtual PC 2007 on my computer, would it then work if I moved it to a Virtual PC 2007 install on my wife's PC? I noticed that it detects much of my hardware in its device manager, so I'm wondering if I would need to run sysprep in the virtual machine first, or if I could just simply move the .vhd file to her computer.
 
yea, as aild said, you can in vmware because it detects all devices as generic. if virtualpc detects your actual installed hardware then it might work a bit differently. if it was a one time move you could probably do it with minimal hassle, but I wouldnt want to do that all the time
 
Virtual machines are portable, yes. There is the question of licensing issues, but... that's basically a "don't ask, don't tell" kinda thing. I have an XP VM I created in VPC2K7 and did all the updates, all the software I needed in it, then I did a precompacting pass (search Google for "virtual pc precompactor" for more info - it basically compacts the VM and recovers lost space for optimization) and then I took the vmc and vhd files and crunched 'em down with WinRAR on the highest compression setting. Sits at about 1.16GB or so, and I keep that file around.

I can take that RAR to any machine running VPC2K7 and extract the vmc and vhd files, double click on the vmc and wham, there's my VM, ready to go.

Any VM created under a specific piece of software is portable across any version of that software, meaning:

VMWare VMs can be created on a Windows Host and then used on a Linux Host, or vice versa. VirtualBox VMs created on Linux can be used on a Windows Host, etc.

Pretty cool stuff and it most certainly comes in handy for cross platform testing of various kinds. You have to move the vmc and the vhd files to whichever Host machine you plan to use - both files are what make up the "virtual machine."

Hope this helps...
 
bbz_Ghost said:
Hope this helps...
Click to expand...
No, it was all worthless crap, stop spamming my threads! ;)

That's exactly what I was hoping to hear, and I will definitely look into the Precompactor. I've never heard of such a thing, but it certainly makes sense.

Thanks for the info!
 
MS Virtual PC images are also portable to MS Virtual Server 2005, except Virtual Server doesn't provide sound card emulation so if you build your image to include that, the sound card driver will fail to load. Other than that, its completely portable.

The early versions of VMWare had some hardware dependencies on the underlying platform, but that hasn't been the case for several years.
 
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