If you need to access VirtualBox shared folders from a Windows Server 2008 guest OS, do not use the Network entry in Windows Explorer to map a network drive, since you will not be able to view the share.
The easiest way is to load the command line in Windows Server 2008, and assuming your VirtualBox shared folder is named sharename, execute the following command to map the shared folder to drive x.
net use x: \\vboxsvr\sharename
If you need to create a new copy of a VirtualBox machine, i.e. clone the machine, do not copy the vdi files directly. If you do so, when you try to add the hard disk using the Virtual Media Manager you will get an error that an existing hard disk is already mounted.
VirtualBox stores a unique identifier UUID, similar to a GUID, within each vdi file and if it matches the UUID of an already mounted hard disk it will not allow you to add the copied hard disk.
The proper way to do this is through the command line VBoxManage utility. Strangely enough cloning functionality although available through this utility is not yet integrated into the GUI.
Anyway, before you can clone a vdi file make sure that there are no snapshots associated or if you have you need to merge all changes before you continue.
Here I show how to use the VBoxManage utility from a Linux terminal, in this case Ubuntu distro. If your host OS is Windows read Cloning and Copying VirtualBox virtual machines.
In Linux all you need to do is load the terminal, go to the location where the vdi file you want to clone is stored, and then execute the following command:
VBoxManage clonehd "original hdd.vdi" "cloned hdd.vdi"
That is all there is to it. Note that this process can take up quite some time. It all depends on the size of the vdi file you want to clone and your physical hard drive speed.
My main development machine was running on top of Windows Vista since it was pre-installed. When I bought the machine, I had neither time or willingness to switch OS.
To cut a long story short, Vista was really limiting the potential of my machine since out of the box it sucked up roughly 750MB of memory. After installing my usual tools, Vista was booting to a whopping 1GB of memory. This really limited my work since I constantly need to work with virtual machines.
So after reading some interesting information about using Windows Server 2008 as a main development machine and thinking how to go about it I finally made up my mind on the following setup.
Host OS: Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop Edition + WICD Manager since Network Manager sucks, all of this installed in a 15GB partition along with a 5GB swap partition.
Ubuntu 9.04 uses less than 250MB after booting. Then I installed Sun’s VirtualBox 3 to create my virtual development machine. Guest OS, is Windows Server 2008 standard with some small tweaks to make it more useable as a desktop OS.
Windows Server 2008 consumes roughly 300MB after booting, leaving ample space for me to work.
With this configuration I also get all of the flexibility of virtual machines, such as cloning, suspending, using the same Ubuntu host OS machine to load any virtual machine I need, and on top of all that, never have to re-install Windows or any software if something goes wrong.
All virtual machines’ files are stored and run from an external 500GB drive, which is backed up on to another 500GB external drive. This way I am not tied to any particular machine, reducing downtime if something goes wrong. All big pluses.
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