VirtualBox / Import Appliance / Overview

Introduction
VirtualBox Manager Groups

Introduction

Virtual machines that have been previously created, configured, and exported as "appliances" can be imported to create a new virtual machine (VM) instance. This allows, for example, one team member, collaborator, or product provider to create a well-defined environment so that others can leverage that work.

VirtualBox appliances are imported using the File / Import Appliance menu. The following documentation has been created for illustrating how to import an appliance:

VirtualBox Manager Groups

Appliances that are imported into VirtualBox can be organized into groups. It is recommended that naming conventions for groups are decided before importing appliances because it can be confusing to rename and move later. However, creating an empty group ahead of time does not seem to be an option in VirtualBox Manager. Instead, groups are created by selecting multiple VMs and then creating a group using the right-click popup menu. Therefore, have a plan for how VMs should be grouped, but using groups may need to wait until two or more VMs are defined.

See the following:

VirtualBox 6 Using VM Groups

The following example shows several groups for various products and development stages (e.g., development and testing). Defining VMs for different Linux distributions will result in multiple VMs that can logically be organized into groups.

VirtualBox Manager Groups (see full-size image)