Save and restore virtual machines

[kdurski]

Hi.

First of all, thanks for the hard work!

I remember seeing at WWDC that in Sonoma we should be able to suspend a VM:

Save and restore virtual machines

Is this something that is on the roadmap?

[insidegui]

I forgot to reply but was reminded of this today by @Rastafabisch. This is definitely on the roadmap 👍🏻

[kdurski]

Thanks!

[Rastafabisch]

@insidegui I was wondering wether there are any news/ETA regarding said functionality. Apart from this still love VirtualBuddy. Keep up the great work.

[insidegui]

I'm currently working on it in the pause-restore branch. The first iteration is almost done, just missing some UI changes.

[kdurski]

Great news @insidegui, I can't wait :)

[insidegui]

PR opened in #326

[Rastafabisch]

After your merge now, I thought of another addition, which could be a worthy feature of this functionality:

In the currently implemented versioning mode of the Suspend and resume feature, it would be useful if triggering this action would through a dialog where you could set a name of the caved stated, or just hit enter to select the default timestamp based save.

Also I wondered what's the reasoning behind having a dedicated path for those safe states rather than them being part of the .vbvm bundle.

[insidegui]

After your merge now, I thought of another addition, which could be a worthy feature of this functionality:

In the currently implemented versioning mode of the Suspend and resume feature, it would be useful if triggering this action would through a dialog where you could set a name of the caved stated, or just hit enter to select the default timestamp based save.

Also I wondered what's the reasoning behind having a dedicated path for those safe states rather than them being part of the .vbvm bundle.

Both of those points are addressed in the original message of the pull request 🙂

[Jabiru240]

As an end-user of this (so far) excellent product and not in the depths of actually developing and building it, can you please explain how to restore to a saved ...save current state.... works. I get it is like a snapshot - exactly what I want, but I save the current state and:

1. where does it go?
2. How do I revert to that saved state?

Apologies if this is a bit trivial, but it's not immediately obvious (to me at least).

UPDATE
OK, found the saved state files in the VM folder. So these are *.vbst files. How do I use them?
UPDATE 1
So if I double click the .vbst file it tells me that VM in use.
If I shutdown VirtualBuddy and double click the .vbst file I want, it shows the Sonoma VM and if I click that it Restores to the state it was saved at (brilliant), but is that how it is supposed to operate?

1. Shutdown the VM or Virtual Buddy
2. Double click the .vbst file
3. Select the VM that is displayed
4. VM is restored
   UPDATE 2
   OK, I see that if I shutdown the VM (not Virtual Buddy) I can get to select the Saved State I want to restore or simply boot the VM.
   This is really very good. Apologies for stuffing you around, not my intent.

Thanks, Kevin

[insidegui]

Thanks, Kevin!

Your feedback shows that there's probably some work to be done to make this feature easier to use.