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It's possible to start VirtualBox from both:

• A physical USB stick, after doing some not-too-complicated magic on the command line:

  https://www.how2shout.com/how-to/virtualbox-virtual-machine-boot-usb.html#Step_3_Create_VDMK_Raw_file_of_connected_bootable_USB_drive

  Users can use the Persistent Storage on the physical USB stick out of the box.

• A USB image, after converting it to VDI on the command line and increasing its size:

  $ VBoxManage convertdd eos-eos3.0-amd64-amd64.161024-144409.base.img eos.vdi

  https://www.pragmaticlinux.com/2020/09/how-to-increase-the-disk-size-in-a-virtualbox-virtual-machine/

  When creating a Persistent Storage, I got:

  Error: Tails is running from non-USB / non-SDIO device.

  Probably something that could be fixed.

In both cases, users also have to remove live-media=removable. (#6397)

• Double-check whether we could workaround the need to remove live-media=removable.

Once we get there we could advertize USB image only for virtual machines as virt-manager works fine with USB images as well. I didn't test GNOME Disks.

Stats from WhisperBack reports in 2019 and 2020:

	ISO		VFAT
VirtualBox	24	50%	1	2%
QEMU	12	25%	11	23%
			48

• For QEMU where USB images are already available, half of users choose them despite not being the default download.
• Some people already running VirtualBox from a physical or virtual USB stick.