Savvy Solutions

The advantage of a system image is that if a hard drive crashes, you can replace it, restore the image, and have your system right back to where it was when the image was captured.   No need to reinstall the operating system, or the applications.   The biggest disadvantage with system image backups is that you can’t restore the backup to a different PC (but you can restore it to a different hard drive).   The reason you cannot restore the image to a different PC is because Windows OS is setup specifically for your hardware.   HOWEVER, you can restore a system image of a Virtual Machine (VM) running on one PC to another PC.   So if you create a VM on one machine and install all of your apps on that machine, then you can easily transfer it to another PC and run it within a VM.  

The HARDWARE UUID and NAT MAC address is used by Windows activation logic.   VirtualBox 6.0.8 has an explicit cloning option to retain hardware UUIDs in the clone.  

To make sure that Windows 7, Windows 8/8.1, Windows 10, and Windows Server clones are properly activated when the clones are created, you must use Microsoft volume activation on the parent virtual machine.   The volume-activation technology requires a volume license key.   To activate Windows with volume activation, you use Key Management Service (KMS), which requires a KMS license key.