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Moving VirtualBox VM Question

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Carlosinfl

Loves the juice
Joined
Sep 25, 2002
Messages
6,633
I have a Linux VM on my existing PC running the latest version of VirtualBox. My company has ordered me a new PC to replace my current one which has VirtualBox installed. My questions is, can I simply copy my VM to a USB drive and move it over to the new PC running VirtualBox w/o any issues? I don't know if the new PC has slightly different chipsets and components so I'm guessing they're not 100% identical. Will there be any issues or is there some conversion process that needs to take place?

If it matters, the following info is all I know:

Old PC = Q9650 & 8 GB of DDR3 RAM
New PC = i7-2700K & 16 GB of DDR3 RAM
 
It shouldn't matter, as the guest should be seeing a standardized set of virtual HW. What is on the host is not important (if the releases of virtualbox are the same or at least similar...)
 
Yes. You can move your VM around to any other VBox install (it will convert the files automatically if you move/upgrade from 3.x to 4.x). You can even easily convert it to VMWare or something else if you wish.
 
So when you do an install on an older PC, it doesn't load modules / files for specific hardware? What if you then move that O.S. to a machine that doesn't have that hardware or different hardware...doesn't that cause some issues or zombie files to linger?
 
Carlosinfl said:
So when you do an install on an older PC, it doesn't load modules / files for specific hardware? What if you then move that O.S. to a machine that doesn't have that hardware or different hardware...doesn't that cause some issues or zombie files to linger?
Click to expand...

VMs use special virtual hardware that is unrelated to the physical hardware in the host machine.

There are some exceptions, such as direct USB hardware access, but if you didn't specifically configure special hardware, your VM will be fully portable to other VirtualBox installs. If you did configure a special USB device, you may want to plug that device in if you are moving the VM in a suspended state. If you shut down the VM completely before moving it, there shouldn't be any issues at all.
 
Carlosinfl said:
So when you do an install on an older PC, it doesn't load modules / files for specific hardware? What if you then move that O.S. to a machine that doesn't have that hardware or different hardware...doesn't that cause some issues or zombie files to linger?
Click to expand...

did you not see my post? i answered that precise question (i thought, anyway.)
 
You could just export the VM as an appliance, it will make a single file that contains the HDD and all the config files, open it in virtualbox on the new pc and it will load a the files to where they need to go.

also sense your getting an i7, after moving it over, change the settings for the VM, ( settings menu, system, acceleration) and enable VT-x/AMD-V and Nesting Paging, this will boost speeds in the VM by utilizing virtual acceleration.
 
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