VBoxTool Rumi, May 6, 2011June 11, 2018 Provides effective control of virtual machines of VirtualBox (virtualization solution) on a Linux headless server, published as free and open source software. Currently VirtualBox lacks a decent management environment for controlling virtual sessions on a headless server environment. VBoxTool mimics partly Virtual Machine Manager which controls sessions for other virtualization solutions like Qemu, KVM, etc. Unfortunately, VirtualBox is not in the list of supported engines (nor will be in the near future). Features Heart of the framework is a script which can do several actions (start, save, backup, etc.) on all registered VirtualBox sessions in batch mode. It is a wrapper around VBoxManage (the command line interface of VirtualBox), so execution is also by command line. Autostart at host boot. When the host boots, all sessions registered in /etc/vboxtool/machines.conf will be started in the background, issuing a ‘vboxtool autostart’ command under the named vbox_user in /etc/vboxtool/vboxtool.conf. Autosave at host halt. When the host has a controlled down, i.e. halted, all running sessions are automatically saved. Show info. Name, status (running, saved, etc.) and other info of all registered sessions like the configured VRDP port are shown with the command ‘vboxtool show’. When a session is running, also CPU load and memory usage are shown. As an alternative, ‘vboxtool showrun’ shows info only of running sessions. Mass operation: save, start, stop. Save all running sessions with one command without any configuration: ‘vboxtool save’. Start all saved sessions with ‘vboxtool start’. Stop all running sessions with ‘vboxtool stop’. Mass backup. Backup all sessions using rsync with one command: ‘vboxtool backup’. When a session is running, it is saved and restarted after the backup. The next level of backup, could mean that on line backup (thus without bringing the session off line) is possible*. Batch start. Controlled start of several sessions, defined in a configuration file, /etc/vboxtool/machines.conf. Only sessions named in that file will be started by ‘vboxtool autostart’. Mass configuration of VRDP port and port forwarding. Configure VRDP port and port forwarding for all sessions, all at once in one command: ‘vboxtool autostart’. Configuration takes place in /etc/vboxtool/machines.conf. When using port forwarding, there’s no need for host interfacing anymore (in Linux, a tedious, complex task). *System monitoring. Monitor server status, session cpu load and memory in a graphical image. This will be done by developing and implementing a Munin plugin. Munin is a system monitoring platform with a plugin structure. Src: http://vboxtool.sourceforge.net/ Related Virtualbox Virtualization
Virtualbox fixing VRDE on 0.0.0.0 instead 127.0.0.1 October 21, 2020 By default, Remote Display only works on localhost / 127.0.0.1 and cannot be accessed by ip address or hostname. Check VRDE / Remote Display IP Address You can check VRDE / Remote Display ip address using the following methods: Open command prompt and run netstat -an |find /i “listening” or netstat -an |find /i “[PORT_NUMBER]” and you shall notice it is listening on 127.0.0.1:PORT. Related Read More
Compacting VirtualBox’s VDI file size? February 8, 2017 Run defrag in the guest (Windows only) Nullify free space: With a Linux Guest run this: sudo dd if=/dev/zero | pv | sudo dd of=/bigemptyfile bs=4096k sudo rm -rf /bigemptyfile Related Read More
Migrate existing Windows installations to VirtualBox June 28, 2011June 28, 2011 Windows installations, unlike Linux, cannot easily be moved from one hardware to another. This is not just due to Microsoft's activation mechanism but the fact that the installed kernel and drivers depend on the actual hardware. This document explains the common pitfalls and how to workaround these. We assume that… Read More