3

I'm working with a VM Image in VirtualBox. Can I save it to an SD card and boot it from there? Can I save two machines on the SD Card?

Will VirtualBox put all files, related to the Images on that SD card, or will it still use my hard drive?

Which speed does the card need, to run a Windows VM (for testing websites) and an Ubuntu server (for the webserver)?

3
  • 3
    You can put the VirtualBox VM file any where you want.
    – Ramhound
    May 15, 2013 at 13:43
  • 1
    I don't know about NTFS, but running the Linux filesystems on SD cards is not particularly recommended. There are some issues with reliability. There are definitely performance issues when running any filesystem other than the exact fs that the card was originally formatted with. The SD card standard treats everything else as unsupported, and cards include carefully tuned optimisations for it.
    – sourcejedi
    May 16, 2013 at 13:43
  • @sourcejedi - It having bad performance was not the qustion. He asked if it was possible, it is, and VirtualBox supoprts having its VM file located in any locatin you want.
    – Ramhound
    May 16, 2013 at 16:53

3 Answers 3

5
  • You can put multiple VMs on a harddisk. Preferably in separate directories to keep things ordered.
  • If you format the SD card with a filesystem then it is no different from any other directory.

Combine these two and the answer should be an obvious "Yes, you can."

Things get more interesting if you want to use RAW access to a disk or a SD card, but I saw nothing in your question that indicated that you wanted to do that. Also, that would still yield the same answer as when you used a regular harddisk.

Which speed does the card need to run a Windows VM (for testing websites) and a Ubuntu server (for the webserver)

As fast as you want. Get a slower card and you need more patience.
Again, the same as with regular harddisks.

1

VirtualBox is hardware agnostic. As long as it can read and write to the device it would work. Be it a second drive, an SD, USB, or even a Floppy if the image fits.

You can put multiple images in a directory as well. As the directory structure for the VMs looks something like:

  1. FolderForXP
  2. FolderForMint
  3. Mint
  4. XP
1

Be careful!!!
What is mention on other anwsers is true, you can use a SD Card as a disk, BUT, it is not recomended as they have an small number write operations by design. see here for details. So an ordinary OS, will quickly damage an SD card writing to them temporay data, like swap files or similar. On the other hand, if the OS "knows" by design that it is working on a SD Card, it uses it as low as posible or just don't use it. An example of this is Raspberry PI OS.

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .