PHPVirtualbox on Virtualbox

Unlike VMWare, VirtualBox guests are not global; they are owned by the user that creates them. Therefore, it is important to create a user account explicitly for this purpose. Create this user account BEFORE installing VirtualBox. Install VirtualBox from this account and perform all VirtualBox operations from this account. For the rest of this document, we will use the account "vboxuser".

Now install VirtualBox under the account that you created. The rest of this HowTo was done on the regular edition, not the OSE edition, so there may be minor differences.

InstallVBoxWeb

VirtualBox does not provide a Web interface like VMWare. But the Google Code project phpVirtualBox http://code.google.com/p/phpvirtualbox/ works quite well for most tasks. On Ubuntu:

Copy phpvirtualbox to /var/www/vboxweb

sudo update-rc.d vboxweb-service defaults

create /etc/default/virtualbox

VBOXWEB_USER=vbox_user_name (the user name you use when you installed VirtualBox)
#VBOXWEB_HOST=
#VBOXWEB_PORT=
#VBOXWEB_TIMEOUT=
#VBOXWEB_CHECK_INTERVAL=
#VBOXWEB_THREADS=
#VBOXWEB_KEEPALIVE=
#VBOXWEB_LOGFILE=

Modify /var/www/vboxweb/config.php to use the account that you created for VirtualBox.

sudo VBoxManage setproperty websrvauthlibrary null (for OSE version)

IMPORTANT: Make sure the vboxweb-service script has been installed in your /etc/init.d/ directory. I am not sure what part of VirtualBox installs this. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

Remote Control

If you remotely create a VM, you may not have ssh or some other native facility installed in the guest operating system, so how do you control the machine before the network and utilities are running properly? How do you create the equivalent of VMWare's Remote Console?

The answer is RDP. Once phpVirtualBox is installed and running correctly, go to "Settings | Display | Remote Display" for each guest and enter a unique port for that guest. Note that the port assigned here refers to the VirutalBox host. Therefore, the default port of 3389 can only be used for a single guest machine. As a standard, we usually add the last quad of the IP address to 30000 for each guest. So if the host is 192.168.6.25 and the guest is 192.168.6.54, we will connect to the guest at 192.168.6.25:30054. You can connect directly through the "Console" tab on phpvirtualbox, or use a standalone RDP client (which is what we do since sometimes the console in phpvirtualbox doesn't forward ctrl-keys). Clients are available for free on all platforms.