Development VM virtualbox

[jslate1980]

Hi

 

An ex colleague created a development vm using virtualbox that students use for development.

I have been asked to add more software to the vm which is stored on each computers c drive.

Looking at the image its been set to immutable. Is there anyway of disabling it, as I cant seem to be able to find the original base image?

[ZeroHour]

I think you can use https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch08.html#vboxmanage-modifyvdi to change it back to a normal image then you make the changes and modify it back to immutable but I have not used Virtualbox much.

https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch05.html#hdimagewrites

[synaesthesia]

As above, or fire up virtualbox and use media manager to do it.

One thing that made our lives a lot easier was putting the VM on a NAS and having only the relevant files on each PC - saved chucking out over 12gb to each machine each time it was updated. Performs absolutely fine with 60 concurrent users too.

[mdrabble]

As above, or fire up virtualbox and use media manager to do it.

One thing that made our lives a lot easier was putting the VM on a NAS and having only the relevant files on each PC - saved chucking out over 12gb to each machine each time it was updated. Performs absolutely fine with 60 concurrent users too.

 

Could you share the steps you used to get your VM running from a NAS please.

 

I'm trying and failing as when I make the VHD immutable, the VM complains about differencing disks.

 

Cheers

[synaesthesia]

In Virtual Media Manager, locate the disk and release it from the VM - differencing disk first, then the main one. Once done, you should be able to choose Modify on the main disk and then select Normal. You should then be able to make the relevant changes.

 

Running it from shared storage is relatively simple from what I remember; under the storage/controller setting it's just pointing at our shared location, in our case \\192.168.1.80\VM\Programming.vmdk. Our's sits on a solid state drive connected to the USB3 socket on a Synology NAS, so anything directly connected should be a breeze.

[mdrabble]

I realised 2 things...

 

1. I was using VDI and not vmdk which solved my 1st issue

2. Once I removed the difference as suggested it worked :-)

 

Happy Days