Officially, this has to be done using the clone function in vboxmanager – but you may (as I did) come up in a situation where the virtualbox system in the original host for some reason is not usable.<\/p>\n
I moved my virtual machine between two 64-bits linux systems (the original host running ubuntu, the new host running debian). First I copied the entire directory containing the vm from the old host to the new one. Then I had to look at the .vbox file in that directory (the vm is called dbserver) which starts like this:<\/p>\n
– then the vm could be started with the disks in the same state as it was on the old host.<\/p>\n There might be that I also should have added some information within <MediaRegistry>, but so far it seems to run just fine – and I can do a clone for backing up.<\/p>\n On the linux systems, the files for the vm are stored within \u0303~\/VirtualBox VMs\/<vmname> – ie in my case ~\/VirtualBox VMs\/dbserver. The global settings file is ~\/.VirtualBox\/VirtualBox.xml – in other systems, it may be stored other places. – I have no idea if this will work to move a vm between two hosts with different OSs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Officially, to move a vbox virtual machine to another host, you have to clone it. But – what if vboxmanager for some reason has stopped working on the host you want to move the vms from? Continue reading < ?xml version=\"1.0\"?>
\n<!--
\n** DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE.
\n** If you make changes to this file while any VirtualBox related application
\n** is running, your changes will be overwritten later, without taking effect.
\n** Use VBoxManage or the VirtualBox Manager GUI to make changes.
\n-->
\n<VirtualBox xmlns=\"http:\/\/www.innotek.de\/VirtualBox-settings\" version=\"1.12-linux\">
\n <Machine uuid=\"{29fc488f-7e02-4564-b407-373dd72731c3}\" name=\"dbserver\" OSType=\"Ubuntu_64\" currentSnapshot=\"{bf8a6162-452f-4433-b0ac-20732c166748}\" snapshotFolder=\"Snapshots\" lastStateChange=\"2013-04-20T16:07:17Z\">
\n <MediaRegistry>
\n ...
\n <\/code>
\nThe important part is the “Machine uuid” In the global settings file for vboxmanager, Virtualbox.xml, I had to add a line within the <MachineRegistry><\/p>\n
\n<MachineRegistry>
\n<MachineEntry uuid=\"{29fc488f-7e02-4564-b407-373dd72731c3}\" src=\"\/home\/morten\/VirtualBox VMs\/dbserver\/dbserver.vbox\"\/>
\n<\/code><\/p>\n