Can I take a VM for a walk?

[allskar]

Hey, so, I'm extremely new to Unraid and pretty much everything virtualization.

I managed to run a few different VMs with passthrough successfuly (extremely easy tbh, I'm stoked), and I'm really considering purchasing the license AND bring it to the company I work for (500+ employees).

I'm using different linux VMs, for different software development projects and my final goal is to able to grab that VM, stick it into a laptop and keep working on the go, then back home.

Would that be possible? What do you guys suggest?

I don't expect perfect performance on the laptop, but being able to move around with my environment is the dream.

[Xaero]

You have a few options, you can burn the image to a physical disk and then boot it on real hardware - YMMV depending on OS (linux usually doesn't care) on what does/doesn't work hardware or software wise on real bare metal. For example Windows may deactivate itself if the physical configuration is too different from the VM it was running on. The other option is to use a HyperVisor or VM solution to boot the virtual hard disk file. You can import machine into VirtualBox, VMWare, set up Qemu/KVM on your bare metal OS and boot the image there etc. I would recommend snapshotting before migrating both directions (a backup before you go on a trip, and a backup before you replace the VM image afterwards.

Another option is to set up Apache Guacamole or a similar remote access application and just remote into the server/vm and do your work remotely just as if you were at home working on the VM. Of course, this is restricted by your internet speed and access abroad, so might not be applicable.