Virtual Machine on external SSD

[Nem]

I find myself needing to work from different computers these days, and I'd like to plug in a drive into any computer and do work. So I'm thinking of running portable virtualbox on an SSD, so I can just plug in the drive on any computer, start up the virtual machine on the external drive and proceed with my regular environment (Linux environment for both programming and word processing tasks). I dont want to create something like a bootable USB because I cant guarantee that the computer I'm using is set to boot from USB, so a VM seems the best solution

 

A few questions about this:

 

1. What is the difference between an external SSD and a USB/flash drive for this purpose?

2. Speed will capped by the USB3.0 interface, so will running a VM from an external drive be fast enough?

3. Is there a difference between getting an external SSD, and an external enclosure with regular SSD?

4. How does an external m.2 fit into the picture (if such a thing exists)?

5. Any recommendations for drives and enclosures that would work well for this purpose?

[NoRomanBatmansAllowed]

9 minutes ago, Nem said:

I find myself needing to work from different computers these days, and I'd like to plug in a drive into any computer and do work. So I'm thinking of running portable virtualbox on an SSD, so I can just plug in the drive on any computer, start up the virtual machine on the external drive and proceed with my regular environment (Linux environment for both programming and word processing tasks). I dont want to create something like a bootable USB because I cant guarantee that the computer I'm using is set to boot from USB, so a VM seems the best solution

 

A few questions about this:

 

1. What is the difference between an external SSD and a USB/flash drive for this purpose?

2. Speed will capped by the USB3.0 interface, so will running a VM from an external drive be fast enough?

3. Is there a difference between getting an external SSD, and an external enclosure with regular SSD?

4. How does an external m.2 fit into the picture (if such a thing exists)?

5. Any recommendations for drives and enclosures that would work well for this purpose?

Are you sure that all the PCs you work on that you'll have admin privileges?

 

Because afaik for virtualbox to run (even portable virtualbox) it needs admin rights.

[Nem]

well, I have permission to install software on all of these machines assuming thats the only admin level thing required to run virtualbox

[Jarsky]

So the machines all have virtualisation enabled hardware and virtualisation turned on? Seems a lot more convoluted than just switching the boot device. I gather portable VirtualBox requires admin for configuring network, and this assuming they aren't domain computers with applocker 

[nishank93]

38 minutes ago, Nem said:

I find myself needing to work from different computers these days, and I'd like to plug in a drive into any computer and do work. So I'm thinking of running portable virtualbox on an SSD, so I can just plug in the drive on any computer, start up the virtual machine on the external drive and proceed with my regular environment (Linux environment for both programming and word processing tasks). I dont want to create something like a bootable USB because I cant guarantee that the computer I'm using is set to boot from USB, so a VM seems the best solution

 

A few questions about this:

 

1. What is the difference between an external SSD and a USB/flash drive for this purpose?

2. Speed will capped by the USB3.0 interface, so will running a VM from an external drive be fast enough?

3. Is there a difference between getting an external SSD, and an external enclosure with regular SSD?

4. How does an external m.2 fit into the picture (if such a thing exists)?

5. Any recommendations for drives and enclosures that would work well for this purpose?

Presuming you are able to get a VM working on an external drive, which I have not tried before:

 

1) There are some pretty fast flash drives, but I don't know how well they'll cope with random IO at low queue depth, which is probably what an OS needs most. I'd recommend a portable SSD.

2) USB3.0 is capped at around 60 MB/s (480 Mb/s), so you won't get SATAIII level sequential performance, but it may be enough for running an OS. I'm not sure.

3) Other than a small difference in cost and flexibility of choosing an SSD/enclosure you like, no.

4) There are external M.2 and mSATA drive enclosures, but you'll be limited to USB3.0 on most computers, so I don't see much point other than a physically smaller drive. I don't know if there are any external NVMe drives (if you really need more IO at low queue depth), and I don't know if they'll be worth the extra cost to begin with.

5) A Samsung T3 is a safe bet. It's small, has a fast SSD inside, is available is a variety of capacities, and is USB3.1 compatible in case you want that. A T1 is cheaper but is USB3.0 only.