VirtualBox Virtual To Physical

Info Box Applies to DVDK

Introduction

Virtual Machine are really useful, mainly because:

1. hardware independence: a VM created on a PC can run on another PC without modification, if using the same (or nearly the same) virtualization product
2. provide easy backup with snapshot functionality: user can save the state of a VM and later restore it with just a few clicks
3. many VM can run on the same machine: limited only by host hardware resources, user can run as many guest VM as he/she likes at once

However such a flexibility comes with a bit of performance drawback: a VM is always slower than a physical machine.

Some VM manger, usually type 1 hypervisor (that runs directly on bare metal), can give to the VM nearly 100% of host horsepower but are harder to manage than the (slower) type 2 hypervisors, that runs as an application inside the host OS.

For a more detailed description of VMM and hypervisors, see Hypervisor article in Wikipedia.

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For this reason is useful to convert a Virtual Machine (like the one provided with DVDK) into a physical machine, without the requirement to re-install the whole environment.

In the rest of this article we'll see how easily clone DVDK VM into a physical machine, on an empty harddisk (no OS installation is required before starting the clone procedure).