Questions about Virtual Box

[mhbell]

Installed Virtual Box on my linux mint 16 I was wondering does the VDI take up the amount of disk space on the hard drive making it unusable for other files and storage? for example I had to create a Virtual disk of 25 GB for win7 does this mean that my hard drive has 25 GB less free space or is it a small fraction of that?

[amenditman]

If you choose "Dynamic" as the storage type it will be smaller at first and grow as needed.

If you choose "Fixed" as the storage type it will be 25 GB right away.

[mhbell]

I know that but what I was asking is will the 25 GB fixed make the free space on my hard drive 25 GB smaller. I read or seen somewhere that the virtual disc would be 25 GB but the actual space taken would be considerably less. I am trying to get that clarrified.

Mel

[Hedon James]

I didn't know the answer to this, as I have always selected Dynamic drive size, but it occurs to me that I SHOULD know this answer. So I googled around the VirtualBox forums and found the answer for us, specifically post #2:

 

https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=43344

 

So, indeed, a fixed disk size of 25GB will reduce the the size of free space on your disk by an equal amount, regardless of how much of the 25GB is actually being used.

[securitybreach]

I thought that was the whole point of dynamic disk space, it only uses the amount required up until the amount you designate.

.

[mhbell]

I thought that was the whole point of dynamic disk space, it only uses the amount required up until the amount you designate.

.

 

Thanks everyone for your answers. The problem that I ran into was Win7 requires a min of 25 GB so I lose 25 GB of my HD to install win7 also some Linux distros require more than the 8 GB for dynamic as the default. Guess I will see if I can change the dynamic default from 8 GB to say 25 GB and see if it will use a smaller amount of HD Space if the whole 25 GB is not required.

[amenditman]

You can change the maximum size to anything you want on the size screen and still use a "Dynamic" disk type and only use what is needed up to the max.

[mhbell]

You can change the maximum size to anything you want on the size screen and still use a "Dynamic" disk type and only use what is needed up to the max.

thank you, that is what I was hoping for.

[Hedon James]

You can do what you're hoping for Bell. I have a Win7 VM with a dynamic 50GB disk size; I chose that size because I can't imagine ever needing more for windows programs (any win-generated data is saved to an external non-VM harddrive), AND I want to be able to export the Win7 VM to another workhorse machine in the future (if need be), AND I hope that by the time Win7 is no longer supported that Win8.* or its successor(s) will no longer be the de facto standard OS on consumer computing machines, thereby rendering my Win7 VM a convenience rather than a necessity. But I digress...

 

That Win7 VM with a dynamic 50GB disk is showing up as slightly less than 30GB from within Nautilus. I highly recommend the dynamic option. Even if it needs to be "grown" bigger in the future, it's a fairly simple matter to add a second hard drive to a VM (of the larger size you need), switch your cd-passthrough device to a bootable ISO, and clone your too-small disk to a larger disk and then "grow" the cloned disk to the larger disk. Sounds complicated, but its actually fairly simple and easy. Conversely, you can "grow" a VirtualBox disk from the command line. Taken from a HowToGeek tutorial:

 

http://www.howtogeek.com/171228/10-virtualbox-tricks-and-advanced-features-you-should-know-about/

 

The very last paragraph links to a second article regarding enlarging VirtualBox and VMWare disks:

 

http://www.howtogeek.com/124622/how-to-enlarge-a-virtual-machines-disk-in-virtualbox-or-vmware/

 

Although the writer demonstrates his tutorial from the perspective of a Windows user and the Command Prompt, it's very easy for a Linux user to translate this to the CLI terminal, by navigating to the appropriate directory where the virtual disk file is located and typing the referenced commands. I have used this method to enlarge my VirtualBox disks and can attest that it works perfectly, and much quicker than the manual method described above. Just make sure to have gPartEd already handy, whether its a part of a live cd ISO or its own live CD.