Simple SMF to start/stop VBoxHeadless on boot / shutdown

[rahvee_clevertrove]

I created SimpleSMF http://code.google.com/p/simplesmf/ virtualbox-guest-control to automatically start / stop virtualbox guests upon host boot / shutdown / reboot. It easily supports starting/stopping with any user and any command you need, also easily supports chowning any zvol or raw devices necessary, start and stop guests in any order you wish, with any time delay or other test in between guest start/stop actions. Because it's a shell script. It's designed to be very simple, as the name suggests.

I was using vboxsvc, which is good, but complex and I was having difficulty making it behave the way I want, not to mention, since I'm using rawvmdk to wrap around a zvol, I need to chown the zvol before starting the guest... This is a feature being presently added to vboxsvc, but not existent at the time of the writing of SimpleSMF virtualbox-guest-control.

I also considered the built-in virtualbox smf service new in 4.2, but I'm told (haven't tested) that it only supports startup, not shutdown. (Can anybody confirm/deny the presence of graceful shutdown support?) I don't expect the virtualbox smf service to support the chown. Which means, at least for me the only solution is SimpleSMF virtualbox-guest-control.

Hope it's useful to other people too. Good luck.