Introducing VmServiceTray, and VBoxVmService 4.0What is VmServiceTray? It is a system-tray control to interact with the VMs controlled by VBoxVmService. It works as the GUI counterpart to VmServiceControl.exe. It shows all configured VMs and their states, allows single VMs to be started/stopped. It can also be used to start/stop VBoxVmService directly (with UAC elevation on Vista and later).
This has been a long wanted feature since several years ago. Why hasn't it been added earlier? Well, mainly because I didn't really feel a need for the tray myself. But I understand a lot of people want it and finally decided to give it a try.
After days of using I found VmServiceTray is much easier to use. In case I need to start/stop a given VM, I could simply run VmServiceTray and right click the tray icon, select the VM and select either start or stop. This is much convenient than opening Command Prompt, cd to VBoxVmService installation path and issue command "VmServiceControl.exe -su" or "VmServiceControl.exe -sd". Starting/stopping VBoxVmService itself is also much easier. In fact, I never feel need to use VmServiceControl.exe anymore.
To make it easier to use, I've also added a GUI installer created with InnoSetup. It will create a VmServiceTray icon on your desktop, and will also install VBoxVmService service automatically, so that you don't have to do anything in Command Prompt anymore.
These will be part of next release (VBoxVmService 4.0). But since this is quite new and haven't been tested on machines other than mine, I would like to invite interested people to test, before it's formally released.
To try it out:
If you find any problems, please post at
https://sourceforge.net/p/vboxvmservice/bugs/ or
https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=4762.
Hope you'll like it!
FB2000