2009/6/11 Paul Vriens paul.vriens.wine@gmail.com:
Just installed VirtualBox and it does have snaphots but not so extensive as VMware. In VMware I have some W2K snapshots:
- out-of-the-box
- SP1
- SP2
- SP3
- SP4 + Windows Update
I can freely choose which I want to go to. Not so with VirtualBox I'm afraid as they are all on top of each other.
(I guess for now I keep my other, F10, box around).
You can get this behaviour, but not using snapshots (which as you noticed are cumulative, and rolling back one snapshot deletes its changes). What you do is install your "out-of-the-box" version in a new drive image, then mark that as "immutable". AFAIK, you still have to do that from the command-line, and it's not really intuitive. Something like: 1) De-register your "out-of-the-box" drive image from all VMs you have configured 2) $ vboxmanage closemedium disk <filename> 3) $ vboxmanage openmedium disk <filename> --type immutable 4) Re-associate your VMs to the "out-of-thebox" image. It will inform you now that it is immutable.
You can then create as many VMs as you need with the "immutable" image as the base, and it will automagically create differencing images for you, which you can install the service packs in.
The disadvantage of this is you have multiple VM configurations, all of which have independent settings, but this is what I do for my WinXP browser testing (so I have multiple different versions of IE/Opera/other browsers that don't like other versions existing on the same installation :) ).