updates/applications to all VirtualBox's OS's

Question

Consider i have 3 VirtualBox installed Ubuntu OS's . What i want to do now is to transfer the updates and new application installs to the 2 other Virtual-box installed OS's . so that i can save time for updating them .

Thank you .

Answer 1

I'd suggest the following...

Shutdown all 3 VMs

For each of the 2 VMs to be updated:

• Using VBoxManage, connect the updated VMs root disk as an extra disk
• Boot the VM, login and start a terminal session
• Mount the updated system's root partition e.g. sudo mount /dev/sdb /mnt
• Copy the update cache from the updated machine - sudo cp -dpv /mnt/var/cache/apt/archives/*.deb /var/cache/apt/archives
• Run sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get -y upgrade to update all packages
• Shutdown the VM, disconnect the extra disk and reboot.

The VM to be updated should detect that the .deb file is already 'downloaded' to the cache and simply use it to upgrade. New packages will need to be installed but should also not need to be downloaded again.