VB linked clone support without master

[jamesdobson]

Hi, I saw your pull request to the vagrant project to support linked clones, and it inspired me to take a closer look! Your work takes a giant step towards solving a problem I have with some large vagrant boxes.

Using your pull request as a guidebook to the vagrant source, I thought of a slightly different way to attack the issue. I'm submitting a rough draft to you now as a pull request and am interested in your thoughts.

Pros:

• Reduces space & execution time even further: the disk image from the box is not duplicated.
• Eliminate need to manage the lifecycle of the master VM

Cons:

• Parsing OVFs... 😭

I've done some simple testing with VirtualBox 4.3.18 on OS X. I'm hoping to test this code out on a Windows machine either this week or next.

What do you think? As you can probably tell from the code, I'm not exactly a Ruby programmer. Are you interested in teaming up to try to get this functionality into vagrant?

[mpoeter]

Hi, this is really great, thank you!
I'm not happy about parsing the OVF files, but I see the advantages of this approach.

I will give this a try as soon as I can spare some time.

I'm not a Ruby programmer either - my vagrant PR was my first Ruby project.

[jamesdobson]

Great, thanks for responding!

As an alternative to parsing the OVF files, I tried using different options to the VBoxManage import command to get it to skip the disk, but to no avail: supplying those options would cause import to fail with a validation error.

Also, I've tested it out on Windows 7 with VirtualBox now, too.