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: R-Drive Image treats virtual machines as real hardware computers, so you need to obtain a Standalone license for each virtual machine as well as for the host system (Corporate license for servers). 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/Corporate license from one virtual machine to another, but not backwards. 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 completely remove R-Drive Image from Machine B. R-Drive Image won't be activated on Machine A with the same license 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.

Alternatively, you can obtain a single Technician license that covers all virtual machines and the host system, allowing license transfer between them as many times as required. However, if you choose the Technician license, remember that you can run only one instance of R-Drive Image Technician at a time. You will need to deactivate R-Drive Image on one machine before activating it on another. Additionally, all scheduled tasks, scripts, and related files will not be executed and R-Drive Image will show failed tasks when activated again. Therefore, if you plan to actively use R-Drive Image on multiple virtual machines and the host system, Standalone/Corporate licenses for each machine will be the best option.

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.