About 10 days ago, I decided to shutdown my server because my room was getting uncomfortably hot half way into the night but before I shut it down for the time being, I copied a couple virtual machines over to my continuously running file server that I wanted to remain up. The VM I do my webdev stuff on and a small ftp server for the networked printer to upload scans to.

The process is fairly straight forward. Just download the VMDK disk image to my file server and create a .vbox file for VirtualBox. I kept the virtual NIC’s MAC addresses so they’d get the same IP from my pfsense box but due to NIC driver changes from the differing hypervisors, I had to adjust the network config within the VMs. No biggie.

Gave the webdev vm 2vCPUs and the ftp server got just one and kept the ram allocation the same and it’s almost like nothing happened as far as the guests are concerned. :)

When I decide to start using the room heater / VM box, I can simply shutdown the guests before making minor networking changes again and copy the disk images back over to fire them up on it.

Side note⌗

The space heater computer has got me thinking about a second cooler running machine to run ESXI on as well then it’d be a simple migration to and from as needed or desired. I’m thinking maybe single Xeon E5-something or i7 2nd or 3rd gen cpu with 32GB of ram and about 1TB of disk space ought to do.

Just making a public note. :) Cheers.