Virtual machines, or digital versions of hardware computers, are widely used in data centers for web servers, colocations, cloud computing, software development for other platforms, etc. As their physical counterparts, they also require maintenance, such as data backups and restores. In addition to these operations, a virtual machine may require partition management, disk copying, connecting virtual drives, etc. Likewise, their host system requires these operations as well.

Our program, R-Drive Image, is specifically tailored for these purposes. It can be used in 2 ways for virtual machines:

• On a virtual machine to serve it.
• On the host system where the virtual machine is running to serve the host system and to serve virtual drives from virtual machines on this system.

Our article will give you some examples of how to do this. But before we begin, there's an important licensing information:

• Licenses for virtual machines: You need to obtain either Standalone licenses for each virtual machine (Commercial for servers), or a single Technician license for all virtual machines and the host system. Every installation of R-Drive Image requires proper activation, which binds it to a specific hardware platform, whether physical or virtual. You may transfer a registered/bound Standalone/Commercial license from one virtual machine to another, but not in the opposite direction. Say you may transfer a license from Machine A to Machine B, but you can't return the license from Machine B to Machine A, even if you remove R-Drive Image from Machine B. R-Drive Image won't be activated on Machine A anymore. This clause is applicable to Startup versions, too. You may read more about license transfer in our article R-Drive Image Standalone and Corporate license transferring.
• A license for the host system: You need a single Standalone (or higher) license for the host system. You may use it to serve both the host system and the virtual hard drives of the virtual machines running on this system (from the host system, not the virtual machines!).

1. R-Drive Image can be run on a virtual machine.
It will work as this is a real computer. You may use it for disk imaging, data backup, partition management, and other disk operations.

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Click image to enlarge

If necessary, the R-Drive Image Startup version can be used as well.

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2. R-Drive Image can be run on the host system.
It can be used to serve the host computer or virtual drives from virtual machines.

A quite unique feature of R-Drive Image is its ability to load and process virtual drives (file containers) from most virtual machines (Hyper-V from Microsoft, VMware, and Oracle VM VirtualBox). For example, you may open a virtual disk image from a virtual machine and mount it on the host system as a read-only drive.

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Click image to enlarge

Conclusion
As our article shows, R-Drive Image can be used on virtual machines the same way it is on physical ones. It can perform all disk operations, including disk imaging, data backup, and partition management. In addition, R-Drive Image installed on the host system can open virtual disks of virtual machines to provide access to files on those drives or mount them on the host system.