I’ve been using VirtualBox for a year now and I’m getting pretty ticked every time I have to start a new Ubuntu VM. I speed more time going to root shell prompt to add myself to sudoers file, add myself to groups, the addons, shared folder and storage not mounting right away…… etc etc. I’m sure I might be not using VirtualBox to its full potential to avoid long setup times but I feel like I shouldn’t have to deal with this. It should act is it being installed on a bare metal machine. Is there a more modern approach? Something more streamlined? FYI I’m learning containers and miniKube so I’m not jumping in the deep end yet.
There’s many ways to do this. Saving the disk state is one, I believe that’s what the other person suggested - essentially stores the disk as an image which then you use for future vms as your jumping off point. This is also essentially how workstations are deployed at companies. (Essentially being the key word). Cloud providers have different names for this too, in AWS this is called their AMI.
Another option is Ansible, which essentially handles deploying a VM by running your scripts for you. I haven’t played too much with this, and I doubt it works with VirtualBox, but it’s something you may want to look into, it would definitely uplevel your skills.
Thirdly is dependent on what you actually use your VM for, you haven’t given your use cases but this is one of the reasons containerization became such a thing - because when running an app we mostly don’t care about the underlying system. It may be worth it to learn about docker.
Some combination of Ansible and cloud-init is probably what you’re looking for.
This. Cloud-init, or autoinstall for Ubuntu, to get the install done, then use ansible for anything more.
Save the machine state after you get it booted up and configured. Host+T
Some good advice already in this thread.
Also worth considering QEMU as an alternative to VirtualBox. The Virt-manager tool is decent way of managing machines, and it’s relatively straight forward to create a base machine if you’re duplicating it. Virtualbox is perhaps initially more user friendly for absolute beginners, but once you have any familiarity with virtualization I’d suggest QEMU offers much more.
Also I find integration between the guest and the host linux system is generally more straight forward. Most linux systems already ship with samba and other relevant tools QEMU uses to interact between host and guest. There isn’t a need to faff around with the guest-additions stuff. Plus KVM virtual machines can run with near native performance.
Use virt-manager
Host+T? Is that cloning it?
https://www.alpinelinux.org/about/ Check out Alpine. Might just be enough for what you want
I don’t think it’s a OS thing, I think it’s a hypervisor thing.
