I have a Windows 2008 Datacenter server where I plan on creating dozens of VMs all using the same base Windows 2003 OS with some preinstall components and updates. I was wondering, 1) What are the pros and cons to creating a parent VHD and using Hyper-V differencing disks to create multiple VMs that all share the same parent VHD. I anticipate that this would make creating new VMs based on that image incredibly easy. [...]

I’m struggling to understand how to do differencing disks in VirtualBox v3.1.0. I’ve created a Windows 2008 Server, but now I want to use that as a base image for a number of other servers. The help file has a description of what differencing disks are, but I can’t find where it actually tells you how to do it. In the Storage dialog for a server I found the Differencing Disks checkbox: but when I [...]

How to create a differencing disk (a chained one) from a disk that is already a differencing image? I would like to have: W2008 (base immutable) -> W2008+SQL2008 (differencing, with SQL installed) — This I can do. -> W2008+SQL2008+SharePoint (chained differencing with Sharepoint installed on top of SQL2008) There’s some info about it the manual: http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch05.html#diffimages Differencing images can be chained. If another differencing image is created for a virtual disk that already has a [...]

I’ve recently started trying to use VirtualBox for my new machine so I can prevent the base OS from any artifacts/etc. I’ve created a Base OS and removed the drive, marked it as immutable, and created another for development, attached that drive, made a snapshot, changed the drive to the snapshot and marked the snapshot so it won’t clear each time. I haven’t got in my UI, however, the checkbox that flags it as a [...]