Virtual box - Best for U

Most of you know the advantages of Virtual machines, let me say a little bit about them.

• One can run more than one Operating system at a given time
• Hardware will be more efficiently used among different operating systems
• Taking snapshots (a lot of people love this feature), allows one to revert to previously taken snapshots (nothing but state of the machine) 

    One can find more elaborated information about the Virtual machines in Wiki. A lot of softwares can be found in the market most of them are paid versions (among them VMware is more successful) and some of them are available for free. One of my favorite Virtualization software is Sun VirtualBox. This application gives the best performance comparing with the most famous paid versions. The installing procedure is pretty simple and installation instructions were provided on the website. If you have any queries you can post the questions, always I am there to help.

    Now I am going to give some tips which are really useful for one while using Virtual box.

1. Cloning of the existing Operating System

     You should know that Virtualbox creates a hardisk for each and every Virtual machine that we created with a ".vdi" file extension. Cloning an Operating system is nothing but creation of the new Operating system without really installing it.
    In Linux one can find the Virtual box related files in the following path
    e.g. /home/raj/.VirtualBox/

    Inside the above mentioned path one can find an Harddisks folder where defaultly the created Operating systems hardisks will present. Identify the hardisk file that you need to create the clone and follow the below mentioned steps.

Note: Windows users can directly go to the step 2

    1. Open a shell prompt and login as root by typing the following command, after that enter the password (This step is must otherwise you will get some weird errors)

         $ su -

Note: For windows users for the second step instead of "clonehd" use "clonevdi"

  2 After the first step, type the following command.

          # VBoxManage clonehd "path to the harddisk" "destination path to create the clone"

           e.g. VBoxManage clonehd /home/raj/.VirtualBox/Hardisks/Ubuntu.vdi /data/clone-Ubuntu.vdi

        Thats it ..... after this you have your new clone in the destination path.

Please let me know your comments