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macosvagrantvirtualboxusb-drive
arakibi
arakibi

Reputation: 447

Boot vagrant box on an external drive (usb) with virtual box

I have Virtual box and a customized vagrant box. The thing is that my own laptop (Macbook) has only about 10 Gb of free space. So I bought a 128Gb USB Stick. Now I need to figure out a way to boot up vagrant boxes on this usb stick instead of the default hard drive of my laptop.

Almost all google articles explain how to boot up from the usb. But this is not what I exactly want. Have you ever been through such a situation?

any help would be appreciated!

Upvotes: 3

Views: 1308

Answers (1)

Frederic Henri
Frederic Henri

Reputation: 53783

you can do 3 things :

  1. move your vagrant home directory with all the box on the USB stick (if you have many boxes, it will save some space)

you need to set $VAGRANT_HOME environment variable

  1. move your VirtualBox VM to the USB stick; Open VirtualBox preferences panel and select the new default location folder for VMs. You would need to remove/re-add the VMs in VirtualBox after you moved all files to the external hard drive

  2. You can use Linked Clones

By default new machines are created by importing the base box. For large boxes this produces a large overhead in terms of time (the import operation) and space (the new machine contains a copy of the base box's image). Using linked clones can drastically reduce this overhead.

Linked clones are based on a master VM, which is generated by importing the base box only once the first time it is required. For the linked clones only differencing disk images are created where the parent disk image belongs to the master VM.

It will not help for existing vagrant VM but for your new project, it will help to save space

Upvotes: 3

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