Massively update Guest Additions

[Pierre-Arnaud]

Hello,

I need to manage a big number of VM that run with VirtualBox, and, I like to keep things up to date.
Update VirtualBox, and consequently, Guest Additions can be really tough if you have to do it manually on a large number of machine.
As I like to complicate things, those VM run under any OS you could imagine (from Windows XP to Windows Server 2019, Ubuntu, Debian, Kali, CentOS etc.)
I'd like to do this in a way that is the least intrusive (ie, without creating user or adding any service).

This means that software like Vagrant (which is often advised) is not necessarily suitable.
On the one hand, because it is not obvious to use it on a set of machines that was not built with it.
On the other hand because it requires the creation of a user with specific rights and the installation of ssh.

"vmboxmanage guestcontrol execute" could be the solution, event though I think it needs a "NOPASSWD" sudo account on linux machine.
I'm afraid that writing such a script would be really time consuming too.

I'm not an hypervisor specialist but VMware has an option to "Automatically update VMware Tools on virtual machine" that looks juicy.

Do you think what I'm asking is possible ? Has already be done ? Will be present in a future update ? Is a dream ?

[scottgus1]

There's an unattended update process for Windows, under https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch04. ... ns-windows
4.2.1.3. Unattended Installation

Linux may be scriptable because it's all fundamentally command-line anyway
https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch04. ... ions-linux