Saving, or exporting a virtual machine?

First of all, I want to be clear that I'm not asking about saving states or snapshots. I'm asking if there's a way to save, or export an actual virtual machine without having to create it from scratch.

It's been a couple of years since I built my current rig and it's time to wipe it, install a couple of new hard drives, and start fresh. I hate to have to create my VMs from scratch though, install the OS and all my apps. Is there a way to save a VM so that I can use it again once I get my system back up and running and get Oracle VM Virtualbox reinstalled?

Thanks.

Excellent! I'll look into that.

Thank you.

bfollowell said:

... Is there a way to save a VM so that I can use it again once I get my system back up and running and get Oracle VM Virtualbox reinstalled?

One thing to consider is the question of activation for a Windows 10 VM. Like a physical machine, the digital licence for Windows activation is stored on the MS activation servers and tied to the unique ID of the machine. You need to preserve the ID of the original VM when importing it, otherwise you loose activation.

In Hyper-V this is done by choosing the import option to 'Restore the virtual machine (use the existing unique ID)'.

I'm told that for VMWare you should: '...at first boot of the VM remember to click the "I moved it" and not the "I copied it" box.'

I'm not sure how you'd preserve the machine ID when importing or moving a VirtualBox VM, but it should be possible. See if the documentation helps, now that you are aware of the potential issue.

docs.oracle.com | Oracle® VM VirtualBox User Manual for Release 6.1 (pdf)

Hi there
@Bree

other simple ways -- simply copy the Virtual Machine's data files with file explorer if Windows Host or DD if Linux host (or backup / restore on Linux Hosts with rsync).

Other way - take macrium image (from within the VM) on new machine define HDD large enough but don't install guest OS, then have the iso of macrium stand alone recovery program, boot from it (in the VM) and then restore the OS from the restore media.

I wouldn't waste my time with "Official ways of export / import VM's" unless you've got things like "Linked clones etc". For individual VM's not necessary -. The Macrium method works whether Host is Windows or Linux -- you can also restore a VM created on a Linux host to a Windows one (if using VMWare or VBOX) and the other way around.

Note as well you can image a KVM/QEMU Windows VM with macrium free (again from with the VM) and restore to a VMWare system -- you'll need to adjust the virtual hardware though and possibly use the "Fix windows boot problems" from the stand alone Macrium restore (run again from Within the VM).

All these processes are known as V2V (Virtual to Virtual).

For copying KVM/QEMU Virtual machines to other Linux Hosts - the UUID (identifier is preserved) - for VMWare copies just boot and say I Moved it rather than I copied it at ist boot. I think for HYPER-V and VBOX in the VM's configuration file there's a UUID somewhere which you can set from the old VM --I've seen it somewhere but I can't remember.

Cheers
jimbo