This chapter provides detailed information on the different virtual storage options available in VirtualBox and how they work.
When you create a guest VM, it expects to see a hard disk where it stores the data. VirtualBox needs to present real storage to this guest VM, and this guest VM sees the storage as a virtual hard disk.
There are three ways to achieve this:
- Large image files can be created on the physical hard disk and these image files will be used by VirtualBox, which in turn presents them to the guest VM as a virtual hard disk
- You can present an iSCSI storage to the VirtualBox
- There is an advanced functionality by which you can present the host disks directly to the guest VM
Each of the preceding options will be described in detail.
Each of the virtual storage device types presented in this section needs to be connected to the virtual hard disk controller, which VirtualBox presents to a virtual machine as its hard disk. There are different disk controller standards, and VirtualBox supports most of the commonly used disk controllers. In the next sections, we will discuss the different disk controllers.