As the command help states: ‘This is a development tool and shall only be used to analyse problems. The alternative to the CloneHd tool is an undocumented option available in VBoxManage – the setvdiuuid command. Copying a Disk – The ‘Unsupported’ Method The cloned disk can now be used on a new VM without incurring the ‘I already know about this disk’ error. The VBoxManage tool will chug away and clone the disk for you, creating a new UUID in the process: VBoxManage clonehd "DiskToClone.vdi" "ClonedDisk.vdi" In its simplest form, you would do something like this at the command-line: We need to invoke the CloneHd command of the VBoxManage tool, supplying the disk to clone and the name of the new ‘cloned’ disk. Cloning a Virtual Disk – The ‘Supported’ MethodĬloning a disk is (IMHO) a clunky and Unix-y type way of creating a duplicate disk. Lets look at these two methods in detail. The publicised way around this is to use the command-line VBoxManage CloneHd tool, however there is another – secret and undocumented – way to clone a disk: the setvdiuuid tool. A bit of a ‘wordy’ way to say that it already knows about this disk, don’t you think? If you copy the disk in Windows Explorer and try and use it in a new VM, VirtualBox will have a hissy fit and display the error shown below. With VirtualBox, copying a virtual disk is a bit of a pain. With VMWare’s various offerings, copying a virtual disk is easy: copy the disk in Windows Explorer and add it to a newly created VM VMWare will detect that the disk was a copy and create a new unique identifier (UUID) for the disk before adding it to the VM. That way, when I need a new machine, I can simply create a copy of the virtual disk and add any additional software I need, saving myself valuable time creating new virtual environments. Download it now from .Īs a virtual machine environment user, I regularly create ‘base’ images of machines that I can reuse – a base Windows Server 2003 environment, or SQL Server 2005 environment for example. This new feature is only available in the Sun VirtualBox 3.0 release and above. The toolbar can also be pinned open if required.įor those Windows users reading this post, the toolbar behaves just like the Remote Desktop toolbar that is displayed at the top of the screen during a Terminal Services session. When running a VM in full-screen mode, moving your mouse to the bottom of the screen displays the new toolbar, as shown below.Īll of the features available when running the VM in windowed mode are now available in full-screen mode, including: mounting devices, shared folders, shutdown options etc. It looks as though the VirtualBox Team have added a nice new feature in their 3.0 release – the full-screen toolbar! To move it to the top of the screen, open the Settings dialog for any VM, select General->Advanced and tick the Mini Toolbar: Show at Top of Screen. Update: The full-screen toolbar can be moved to the top of the screen, which (IMHO) is a much more usable location. Windows Server 2008 Core will kindly oblige and shutdown cleanly. Select the ‘Send the shutdown signal’ option and click Ok (the VM sometimes doesn’t respond to the first attempt, but the second attempt is usually recognised). I’ve recently discovered that Server Core will shutdown cleanly when sent the VirtualBox shutdown signal, issued when closing the VM – to bring up the Close Virtual Machine dialog (shown below), simply close the Window the VM is running in, type +Q, or issue the Machine->Close menu-command: Unfortunately, I’m lazy and can’t be bothered to log-in just to shutdown…. Shutting the sever down seems the best way to go, but given that Server Core is the window-less version of the OS, the shutdown command needs to be issued from the command-prompt. I run Windows Server 2008 Core in a VirtualBox virtual machine as my Active Directory Domain Controller for a small BizTalk test environment and I’ve discovered that it doesn’t take kindly to being ‘saved’ – when the server is resumed my other servers seem to be unable to communicate with it and do AD type ‘stuff’.
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