Oracle VirtualBox - Immutable Disk

[kennysarmy]

I've been asked to look again at a Sandbox environment with the reliability of Replit going a bit downhill :/

 

 

VirtualBox V7 has been installed on a Windows 11 23H2 Host and I've created a Win11 23H2 Guest VM, I've then added in the applications the computing department require and made the disk Immutable so that students cannot change the contents.

 

What would be the procedure if I needed to make future changes?

 

From the VirtualBox help files:

 

Immutable images. When an image is switched to immutable mode, a differencing image is created as well. As with snapshots, the parent image then becomes read-only, and the differencing image receives all the write operations. Every time the virtual machine is started, all the immutable images which are attached to it have their respective differencing image thrown away, effectively resetting the virtual machine's virtual disk with every restart.

 

 

Do I simply shutdown the VM.

 

Release the differencing files attached to the main VM and remove the differencing file via the GUI

Make the disk Normal again.

Reattach the VDI file

Boot up the VM, make the changes.

Make the disk Immutable again.

 

Is this the procedure everyone else follows to make updates?

 

Cheers

[ThomL]

It's been 5+ years since I've done this, but that sounds about right... I think.... Try it and see if it works

[kennysarmy]

It's been 5+ years since I've done this, but that sounds about right... I think.... Try it and see if it works

 

Haha - 5 years+ -> I'll be lucky if they go a couple of weeks before wanting something else added !!!

 

Testing it, it seems to do what I expected

[kennysarmy]

Hmmm

 

Is this an issue?

 

[ThomL]

Haha - 5 years+ -> I'll be lucky if they go a couple of weeks before wanting something else added !!!

 

Testing it, it seems to do what I expected

 

I moved to a new employer, to explain the 5+ years . But I do remember several iterations of the disk in the first month, then followed the agreement for any tweaks to take place once per term.

 

I don't remember having activation issues, but I also can't remember if we use KMS/MAK etc. ...no too helpful on this one unfortunately!

[dmj]

Take a look at Vagrant, it's really useful for creating reproducible VirtualBox machines: https://developer.hashicorp.com/vagrant/intro