Virtualbox branching / branched snapshots
An illustrated, step-by-step procedure for branching snapshots using Virtualbox 3.1.0 is available here.
Roman Kennke’s post on branching snapshots describes the feature and provides a how-to guide:
A typical use case would be to install an OS into a virtual disk, make that virtual disk read-only and use it as base image for several branches.
- For example, in one branch I would do testing/debugging of stuff that I develop. There might be several branches I use for testing.
- Then I might need a branch in which I install a build environment for OpenJDK, which could in turn be used for several more sub-branches for OpenJDK6 builds and OpenJDK7 builds.
- In another branch off the base image I would run tax software. Etc
