How can one take a VM and make it run on the machine?
Is it 'possible' to transfer a VM to the metal?
virtual machine
Generally, yes. If your VM is running off native disks or partitions, it may be as simple as pointing your bootloader to it. Otherwise, you'll need to copy the data. For some VM formats, there are tools to mount the VM disk on the host (e.g. xmount). For other formats, the simplest way to get the data is to treat the VM as any old machine and boot a live CD in it.Then your OS must be able to boot on the metal. Unix installations are generally fairly hardware-independent (as long as you stay with the same processor type). You need to have the right drivers, to configure the bootloader and maybe /etc/fstab properly. See for example Moving linux install to a new computer.