I've been using VirtualBox on my desktop for quite a while. Having recently bought a notebook, I want to be able to take my Ubuntu virtual machine with me, and have the changes I do on the notebook propagate to the desktop, and vice-versa, when I arrive/leave home. The host operating system is Windows 7 on both computers, running VirtualBox 4.
My first thought was synchronizing the virtual disk files themselves. My tool of choice would be rsync
, more specifically the Cygwin version of it, using the --inplace
option to reduce writes as much as possible. But that would be infeasible: it would stop me from ever working separately on the VMs, because rsync
would have no way to detect conflicts and merge them properly without knowledge of the filesystems that lie inside the containers.
The next option would be rsync
ing the running machines to each other. Would that work without messing up package management? Would I need to do anything manually besides updates like new kernel or drivers? Are there any other solution that could work better?