I've always thought this is a bit of a flaw with Virtual Box and others. It would be dead easy (and make little difference to the file size) to write the details of the VM to the Virtual Hard disk file. In that way you could easily just start up any VM by browsing to its VHD.
But no, it treats the hard disk as a seperate thing to the VM, which obviously has its uses but most the time you probably want a single machine with a single hard disk.
However there's no reason why you can't just set up identical VMs on two different machines, and then just copy the hard disk over. You'd have to be careful to keep all the settings the same, and I don't think it would preserve any snapshots or saved state.
BTW .vbox files hosted on Windows aren't compatible with Linux, and vice-versa. I found this out the hard way whilst trying to dual boot a machine with both. I thought I'd just be able to run the same VMs regardless of the host OS, but no I had to set them up seperately.
But no, it treats the hard disk as a seperate thing to the VM, which obviously has its uses but most the time you probably want a single machine with a single hard disk.
However there's no reason why you can't just set up identical VMs on two different machines, and then just copy the hard disk over. You'd have to be careful to keep all the settings the same, and I don't think it would preserve any snapshots or saved state.
BTW .vbox files hosted on Windows aren't compatible with Linux, and vice-versa. I found this out the hard way whilst trying to dual boot a machine with both. I thought I'd just be able to run the same VMs regardless of the host OS, but no I had to set them up seperately.
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