Virtual Machine on a USB drive? Possible?

Serious_Scrub

I was assembling a bunch of portable applications, and I suddenly figured, why not just make a portable virtual machine? Unlike a liveCD, I wouldn't have to reboot the host computer (usually not allowed for many of my campus computers). It can potentially allow me to run the applications on any OS, and adding more applications later on would be easier.
I would think this would be possible using thinApp and vmware, but:
I'm not completely sure it will work
I'd rather have a solution that is free (monetarily)
I'm not sure how pagefile usage will work, as if the virtualized OS maintains a pagefile, it sounds like it would wear out the USB drive like crazy
I don't know too much about linux, but is there an easy way to make an application portable on linux, especially without knowing which packages are installed on the machine you're using?

Anybody have experience with doing such a thing?

exoplasm

You could use VMWare Player (I'm sure VirtualBox has something similar) to run it on a thumbdrive. I don't know how well it will work without the VMWare services installed, though. The idea behind VMWare Player is that you can just run it, though.

If you use a Linux VM with a light setup it shouldn't have to use swap at all. Windows, on the other hand, will use the pagefile like life support.

geeeeoffff

that actually sounds like a pretty sweet idea. is there a reason why you can't use a remote desktop like vnc?

I like your virtualbox idea but, i donn'[t know how well it would work for me since most of the computers i use at my school aren't that beefy.

UncleSporky

I had good luck doing this with a simple VM program I found called QEmu.

The really cool thing is using Truecrypt to encrypt the entire contents of the thumb drive, thus having a complete OS with documents and games all perfectly zipped up and protected. Slow as hell, though.