I still use VirtualBox over VMWare, because VMWare Server (stable) won’t compile on my machine. VMWare Server 2 (beta) compiles fine, but the evaluation licence does not permit production use, so I’m teathered to VirtualBox for the moment (unfortunately).

Anyway, much of the work I do invovles testing applications on CLEAN O/S installs so that I can deploy that server straight away, as opposed to having to reinstall the O/S and the application all over again. In VMWare I just copy the VDX file and create a new virtual machine with that hard drive image. In VirtualBox, with Windows hard drives, you’ll get a complaint about the SID being the same if you try to do that on the same host. Apparently this is due to an MS Windows operation, but really I don’t care, I just want the copy to work as I expect it to. To fix this in VirtualBox, you’ll need to drop to the command line and use the VBoxManage command line tool to complete the copy. It will generate a new SId for the virtual drive.

Like this:

$ VBoxManage clonevdi
VirtualBox Command Line Management Interface Version 1.5.0
(C) 2005-2007 innotek GmbH
All rights reserved.

Usage:

VBoxManage clonevdi |

$

So I run:

$ VBoxManage clonevdi /media/disk/VirtualBox_Stock_HDD/WinXP-install.vdi /media/surplus/VirtualBox/WinXP-tony-word.vdi
VirtualBox Command Line Management Interface Version 1.5.0
(C) 2005-2007 innotek GmbH
All rights reserved.

0%…10%…20%…30%…40%…50%…60%…70%…80%…90%…100%
$

And it works. It’s still annoying though. I can’t wait for VMWare 2 to go stable so I can switch all my virtualization back to VMWare