VirtualBox on Windows XP

Today I installed VirtualBox 3.2.12 on a Windows XP. No not 4.0, since that was the version I happened to have with me on my external HD.

I imported the Technet SOABPM Appaliance, but I found that Virtual Box places the disks and machines in a hidden ".VirtualBox" folder within my "Documents and Settings" area. Since on this machine I have a roaming profile I don't want to have folders there with gig's on virtual disks. Logging on Windows with a roaming profile is already slow without this.

So I moved the ".VirtualBox" folder to a "C:\Data\VirtualBox" folder. Then VirtualBox won't find your machine anymore. To solve that a few things are to be done.

First change the defaults paths. In VB Go to <menu>/File/Preferences:

There you can change the paths to "C:\Data\VirtualMachines\VirtualBox\HardDisks" and "C:\Data\VirtualMachines\VirtualBox\Machines".  I differentiate my machines with a VirtualBox subfolder, since I also use VMWare Player.

Then you can make a new VMware image based on the disks. To get the new machine have the same name as the old one I backed up the existing machine directory ("c:\Data\VirtualMachines\VirtualBox\Machines\vbox-oel5u4-soabpm-11gr1ps2-bp1-otn\").

Then I create the machine with the "do not think for yourself, let's do that later"-default settings.
After creating the machine with the two disks, I did a file compare with the old and new "vbox-oel5u4-soabpm-11gr1ps2-bp1-otn.xml" file in the machine folder.

I copy and paste the diffent settings using the file compare tool of TotalCommander in Edit-mode:

• Copy the <description> node
•  <memory pagefusion="false" ramsize="2500"/>
  Under windows XP (with 4GB, effective 3,5 GB memory) VirtualBox does not allow the setting higher then 1500MB. But editing it on file-level allows you to raise it beyond that limit. The appliance was made with 2048. This is pretty little for SoaSuite11g. But not to eat too much from Windows I gave it 2500.
• Copy the <guestproperties> node
• Important: change the SATA-controller to:  <storagecontroller name="SCSI Controller" portcount="16" type="LsiLogic" usehostiocache="true"/>
• I changed some other hardware settings from false to true based on the file compare. Eg. HardwareVirtEx.

Then it turns out that the changes did not reflect in VirtualBox. A refresh did not help. To force  VirtualBox to reread the settings, Killed the VirtualBox service with ProcessExplorer:

That did the trick. Also I have it now running with 2500MB!