VirtualBox (and a VDisk Export Context Menu for it)
One of the things that I come across in my everyday job is the fact that the “Workstation” virtualization software that is being used at every customer differs based on personal preference of the engineeers or the fact that a company has made a guideline for this.
With “workstation” virtualization software I mean the software that is being used to build images, test out some software etc. The products that I see that are most used:
- VMware Workstation
- Microsoft Virtual PC 2007
- Microsoft Windows Virtual PC (Windows 7)
So why is that so annoying? It isn’t actually, it’s a minor nuisance.
The only problem I have is that in my daily work I give workshops and labs, for which I use… yes Virtual Machines 
. The problem is that I have to give the workshop/lab at the customer site, where they use for instance VMware Workstation, for which I and the company I work for don’t have any official licenses, and I’m not going to use a keygen or something like that!
So I have to download the trial of VMware workstation, create my lab VM’’s in that product and copy those to the customer’s environment. So for the same lab/workstation I need at least 2 images, VMware and Virtual PC
Recently I came into contact with VirtualBox (now from Oracle). Which is the perfect man in the middle for me, it’s free, it can work with vmdk, vhd and vdi (VirtualBox’s native disk format). But even better, it can clone the virtual disks to any of those formats as well 
So I can build my environment in VirtualBox at home, and at a customer site just clone the .vdi disk to the preferred format and attach it to a new VM in the customer’s preferred Virtualization solution.
Only downside I found is that there’s no native export to function in the VirtualBox Media Manager. It had to be done via a cmdline utility, no problem ofcourse. But being a lazy bastard as I am… I build a script and context menu’s using powershell, so I can right-click on a VDI, VHD or VMDK file and select Export virtual disk and select
I created a Powershell script which has to be placed in the VirtualBox install directory, and then you need to edit the registry to enable the context menu items…. nah just kidding… download the zip contained in this post and extract it somewhere and run the Install.cmd as an adminstrator. Then you’re set to go… provided you already installed VirtualBox ofcouse .
NOTE 1: I only tested this on Powershell V2, but I think it should work with Powershell V1.
NOTE 2: The powershell execution policy should be set to Unrestriced for this to work!
NOTE 3: It’s important that you run the Install.cmd as an administrator as it makes changes to HKLM\Software\Classes
NOTE 4: Be aware that Microsoft Virtual PC only has support for 32-bit guests, so if you have to prepare a lab/workshop for virtual pc make sure you created a 32-bit machine in VirtualBox.