Is it possible to copy a virtual machine from one computer to another without having to delete it on the first computer? Thanks!
23 Answers
Yes you can. VMs are mostly independent of the 'real' hardware they run on. They emulate a standard set of hardware, and if both hosts support necessary features, things are simple.
Traditionally, you just shut down the VM(for data consistency), copy over the configuration file and disk images , point your VM software at the files with any necessary path changes and you're fine
Where available, it would be worth exporting the VM, as say an OVA, and importing it in again. This simplifies the process considerably.
Many modern hypervisors also have some flavour of live migration.
You might however run into licencing and activation issues with some OSes. I'm not sure if you would need to reactivate windows if you migrated the VM, but it's certainly not going to be legitimate if you run two copies of a single licence on different hosts.
Yes. I know for a fact that you can do so on Hyper-V, VMware Workstation and VirtualBox.
On Hyper-V, there is a live migration wizard. Use it from the MMC console.
On VMware Workstation, you do a simple file copy of all the VM files. WMware Workstation detects the transfer next time your run the clone and communicates without about it. You can then tell it that you copied the virtual machine.
On VirtualBox, there is a Clone command. But using it is not mandatory.
Related to the Hypervisors you use in General yes you can after turn it of the VM to be copied other Hypervisors can copy or clone VM while it running.
for Vbox yes you can Clone it and keep both running without any problem may just copy not gonna works for the same host machine because the VM Hardware identities like uuid and the VHDD ID too.
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