How to manage multiple VMs - Part 2: Guest & Host Setup

Since we will work with many VMs, we will need to keep things tidy. First of all we will specify a Default Folder where we will store our VMs. We can go to File > Preferences... and on the Gereral TAB we will use C:\Virtual Machines. This means that future VMs will be added there by default - we did that manually on the previous posts. 

We can group the VMs, by simply right click and create Group. We can give specific names to each group as shown below:

We can also see that the VMs are also organized on subfolders based on the group name.  

Another very useful feature is Snapshots. Snapshot is like a picture of the VM at the specific time. The powerful characteristic is than once we take the Snapshot, we can revert back to it at any given time. This help us a lot on testing scenarios, where we want to install a new application or we want to update a current application version and we are not sure how it will behave on our current system. 

It doesn't have to be confused with Backups. Backups are normally used for DR scenarios. Actually Backups need Snapshots to be created. 

We take selects Machine > Take Snapshot...

Or Select the VM options as shown below

We can create one or more restore points (Snapshots). We can specify a descriptive name and description. As you can see when the VM is running, the Restore option is grayed out. 

VirtualBox requires the VM to be Powered off in order to restore to a previous State (Snapshot)

Best practices suggest to remove Snapshots when they are no longer needed. We can simply press the Delete Option to erase. 

Compared to VMWare Workstation Pro I can see two great options that are not included:
- Restore to a previous snapshot while the VM is running. 
- Shrink the Virtual Disk when we increase the size if empty space (for Dynamic Disks)

Note: Recently I came through another big difference between VMWare Workstation Pro and Oracle VirtualBox. Only the VMWare product support nested Virtualization.  This means that the integration with GNS3 will not be ideal with Oracle VirtualBox. Also inside VMWare Workstation Pro, I am able to run nested Type-1 Hypervisors (VMWware ESXi) and easily learn and test Type-1 Hypervisors, while this is not possible for VirtualBox.