VirtualBox 7 Misadventure

I see why it's not part of Ubuntu default.

My recent experiments with Qubes got me reading about Trusted Platform Module, my elderly HP Z420s only have TPM 1.2, there are some significant changes with TPM 2.0, and since I can’t just wave my magic wand and make a Z440 appear here, I had to seek alternatives.

I’ve known VirtualBox 7 was out for a while and I attributed my workstation not auto-upgrading to the spooky nature of my 6.1.38 install. Having read that VB7 allowed both virtual TPM 1.2 and 2.0 it seemed some changes were in order. Tonight I decided to wipe it all and install VirtualBox 7 for Ubuntu 22.04. When I began the process virtualbox.org was having an outage(!) which should have been my first clue this was not a good idea.

I had done an rsync of my VirtualBox 6 workstations from the mirrored pair of 1TB drives in my system to the 5TB drive I recently acquired, and I used the command line to export five of them I dare not lose to OVA format just in case. I installed version 7, tried starting the one of them that gets me paid, and no go. I looked around a bit and couldn’t find any sign of the Host Network Manager, the thing that is used to create private virtual subnets in 6. Version 7 lasted for approximately ten minutes before I crossed my fingers and started backing it out.

The return to 6 went smoothly and my VMs are back in operation. This is the Proxmox VM creation dialog, looks like I’ll get some TPM experimentation done, albeit at the cost of using the Proxmox web console. That’s less than optimal since I want to do things with desktop operating systems more than the headless stuff I’d normally do here, but it’s not the worst consolation prize I’ve received this year.