Creating our 1st appliance
An appliance is simply a VM that is saved in an interchangeable format that we can the later clone other VMs from. What we want to do in this case is clone several VMs from an appliance, and uses them for various LabVIEW installations. We'll start with the VM we named "Windows XP Pro SP3" and create an appliance. To do this simply select the VM, and from the "File" menu, select "Export Appliance". Follow the dialogs, and select the path where you want to store your appliance. It will export 3 files, so you'll probably want to create a directory somewhere for you appliance(s). Notice that the original VM hard disk has an extension of .vdi, and the appliance has an extension of .vmdk. Additionally, an .ovf and an .mf file are created.
Importing our 1st appliance
Now you have created your 1st appliance. Notice that a new VM was not added to VirtualBox. To add new VMs from the aplliance, we'll select "Import Appliance" from the file menu. The dialog will prompt you to browse to the .ovf file you just created. After you've selected it, please pay close attention to the next dialog. Make sure to give a descriptive name (i.e XP-LabVIEW 7.1.1) and a good hard disk name (i.e. C:\Users\John\.VirtualBox\HardDisks\XP-LabVIEW 7.1.1.vmdk). The names it selects by default are the same names as the appliance, so you should definitely change them!
