How to convert a Virtual Machine to a Physical Machine and also vice versa too
Hi,
Welcome to this quick informative presentation on "How to convert a Virtual Machine" to a "Physical Machine" and also vice-versa too. I will share my experiences, of doing the same, successfully, on many occasions.
Advantages of a Physical Machine :
1. No overheads of abstraction / emulation layers
2. It's a single operating system that gets the maximum hardware resources, for good performance under heavy workloads.
Advantages of a Virtual Machine :
1. For trials, quick testings, light workloads etc.
2. Can be used simultaneously with many VMs on the same physical machine.
Steps ( VM to Physical ) :
First check the virtual hard disk size from your VirtualBox / Virtualization Software and ensure that you have the same space, free on any of your physical drives, to create an .img out of it. You may also use a USB pen drive / hard drive, with NTFS formatting on it, to support file sizes of more than 4 GB.
Shutdown the virtual machine ( if it's running )
Then on the command prompt ( adjust this command and locations, according to your operating system ) :
"C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\VBoxManage.exe" clonehd --format RAW "C:\VirtualBox VMs\myvmfolder\myvm-disk001.vdi" "D:\VirtualBox VMs\myvmfolder\myvm-disk001.img"
Now, use the free and excellent, cross-platform, Balena Etcher software to flash the .img file to a physical hard drive ( either directly connected through a SATA / NVMe interface ) or through a USB adapter cable for your drive. Balena Etcher also supports reading a .img.gz file format as well. Carefully, select your hard drive, from its hidden devices, dropdown menu, to wipeout / flash the image on to it.
After, successfully flashing the image, reboot the physical machine and change the boot order, either temporarlily or permanently, to boot from the newly flashed disk.
After booting, You may require / or be prompted to install additional hardware drivers, for your newly converted machine.
The .img file created above could also be gzipped ( i.e. .gz format ) with compression level 1, using the free 7-zip software, for future safekeeping.
Steps ( Physical to VM ) :
Use the free Rescuezilla software, to backup your physical machine to an image ( on a NTFS formatted USB drive, for large file support )
Then use the same Rescuezilla software, to restore the image to a virtual machine's new hard disk, after starting the VM and booting from the CDROM ( i.e. .iso file and the USB drive, attached to the VM in its settings, just before starting it up )
All the softwares that I have mentioned above are easily available through Google Search.
They have their respective help guides too, on their websites.
That's all. If you like the presentation, do press the like button, so that others find this video, helpful as well.
Thanks for watching and have a nice day.