A blog for my learnings
Sometimes VirtualBox doesn’t behave when it imports Virtual Machines (appliances).
I exported a Windows 10 VM from one machine to another, imported and ran it to receive a recovery message on launch.
If you’ve got a couple of VMs, then trimming them occasionally will help with storage management on the host. Disk files (like VDI and VMDK images) will grow over time if the VM was configured to expand the disk as needed – but they will never shrink on their own.
This was tested on a Windows 10 VM managed by VirtualBox, the starting file size was over 40GB, as it had been used for various roles and grown over time.
I’m going to build a local VM with the following requirements:
1) It can host PHP/SQL-based websites
2) It has PHPMyAdmin to help administer any SQL databases
3) It matches available builds from popular providers (i.e. you can provision it in a similar way on Azure or AWS, but with a public domain name)
4) It only has a single account (this is not recommended for public systems)
5) I can access the web root using SFTP
As I already have several CentOS builds that have always been pre-setup with CPanel (and because CentOS is free), I’ve decided to do this build from scratch and without a control panel. I’m not going to be configuring options like multiple user accounts, so things will be fairly simple.
I’ll do it in steps (and test each time) to make sure everything’s working correctly. You could install everything all at once, but that would make it much harder to troubleshoot if an element didn’t work.
