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- RUNNING WINDOWS VIRTUAL MACHINE ON MAC OFF USB DRIVE HOW TO
- RUNNING WINDOWS VIRTUAL MACHINE ON MAC OFF USB DRIVE INSTALL
- RUNNING WINDOWS VIRTUAL MACHINE ON MAC OFF USB DRIVE PRO
- RUNNING WINDOWS VIRTUAL MACHINE ON MAC OFF USB DRIVE SOFTWARE
the Inateck USB3 HDD Enclosure with UASP). AFAIK, I have the option between using a flash disk (such as the VisionTek 120GB USB 3.0 Pocket SSD Drive) or buying an internal SSD drive and sticking it in a USB enclosure (e.g. Therefore, I was looking at external SSD disks, specifically for running my virtual machines.
RUNNING WINDOWS VIRTUAL MACHINE ON MAC OFF USB DRIVE SOFTWARE
Here's a screenshot of test using the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test software on the USB drive: As my SSD is limited in size, I'm unable to host all of my VMs on it, and constantly moving VMs between the external disk and the SSD is quite time-consuming. The external disk is fine for regular usage, but the performance difference between running a VM from the external drive compared to running it from the internal SSD is huge.
RUNNING WINDOWS VIRTUAL MACHINE ON MAC OFF USB DRIVE PRO
To always automatically assign a particular USB drive to the guest OS, open the VirtualBox Manager, click Settings, and then USB.įinally, click the Add USB device filter (with the + sign) icon, and select the USB drive that is currently inserted into the host.I'm running VMware Fusion on my Apple Macbook Pro (15 inch, Mid 2012, OSX 10.10.2), and have several VM images that are stored on an external USB3 disk (WD Passport). To unmount the drive, # umount /media/usb da0, and fdisk to reveal the disk partition structure, e.g., s1). Replace /dev/da0s1 with the proper device identifier for your USB drive (you can find out the exact device ID by first running dmesg to identify the device name, e.g. You can mount an MS-DOS-based flash drive by running the following commands as root.
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RUNNING WINDOWS VIRTUAL MACHINE ON MAC OFF USB DRIVE HOW TO
Please see instructions at the end of the section on how to automatically assign this particular USB drive for all subsequent sessions. Open the virtual system console, and right click the USB drive icon.Ĭlick to select your USB drive.Note, this is a one-time assignment only. To avoid any data loss due to pending writes to the drive, it is a good practice to explicitly unmount the drive prior to handing control to the guest. Making it available to the guest will automatically and instantly unmount it from the host. Unmount the flash drive (if it is auto-mounted on your host). Insert the flash drive into your host machine's USB port. More on the use of device filters in the next section.īelow is the step-by-step procedure to mount and access a flash drive. Be forewarned that the USB drive, once made visible to the guest OS, will no longer be available to the host. Select either USB 2.0 (EHCI) Controller or USB 3.0 (xHCI) Controller according to your actual hardware.Note that you can add USB Device Filters to define the types of USB drives which will be automatically made visible to the guest OS. Open VirtualBox Manager, click Settings, and select USB. Before you can change the USB controller protocol, the virtual machine must be powered off.
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Modern hardware uses USB Controller 2.0 (EHCI) and USB Controller 3.0 (xHCI). VirtualBox defaults to using USB Controller 1.1 (OHCI). As root on the host, run the following command to add each VirtualBox user (e.g., peter) to the group. VirtualBox access to the host's USB drives is only granted to users of the vboxusers group. Configuring USBįollow the steps below to configure the VirtualBox USB.Īdd the user to the vboxusers group. The VirtualBox extension pack must be installed on the VirtualBox host. This post shows you how to access, from your guest OS, a flash drive mounted on the Debian host.
RUNNING WINDOWS VIRTUAL MACHINE ON MAC OFF USB DRIVE INSTALL
Parts one and two demonstrate how to install VirtualBox on a Debian host, and to build a FreeBSD virtual machine. This is part three of a three-part series on VirtualBox.
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