I'm thinking both practical and security conscious.

I have an external hard drive not SSD, but platter. I need this because of the larger capacity. I would like to install Linux in a VM (VirtualBox). I would want the Linux guest to be used on both Windows and Linux VirtualBox's.

I am assuming, that the best filesystem for the portable hd itself is NTFS, so it would be formatted to that.
For security, I can choose to encrypt my installation in VirtualBox (I think it's a standard option).

If I were to use my Linux guest somewhere where I am not the person who installed VirtualBox, I guess I'm at the discretion of whatever software it might be, including monitoring and etc. That's not a problem I think, it makes sense.

So for practical useage, is there any other consideration I should make? how can I ensure I have the fastest or most optimized guest as a portable os.

I have some successfull installations, which seem to work perfectly fine, but I'm new to virtualization (Tried a few times some years back).

Why not just use a 'live' distro, (some can be loaded to memory, some can be made 'persistent').

1 members found this post helpful.

A live usb may be a solution (and maybe best) but if you do want some virtual appliance on this portable usb drive then it can be done and can usually run under both windows and linux host OS's. Linux will usually move or rather import at each machine usually.


Problems may be that you won't have know about 32/64 bit support.
USB 3 is almost a must but can be an issue on some distro's.
The VM software would tend to have to be exact and have the client support installed.

There was a neat usb qemu distro out there that ran without admin privileges on windows and with a bit of work could run under linux.

Even issues can happen with a proper install to a usb so no fully portable way exists that has zero problems.

https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...h-docker-37732 ?? maybe?