virtualbox.org

I have multiple monitors except when on the road. One thing that is a pain is, in windows hosts, is that I can't predefine, before starting VM, which VM Monitor shows on physical monitor. Yes the selections made will Stick for the next launch, but it sometimes does not behave well if # of physical monitors change.

I'd like to define general "preferred" VM Monitor to Physical Monitor but also a fall back behavior, If Physical monitors less than desired VM monitors, what action to take, show extra VM monitors or exclude from config.

I 'm looking for something within VM VirtualBox Manager to predefine monitor layout, If have 1 physical only allow 1 monitor, If 2 or more allow start first VM monitor in Physical 1, VM monitor 2 in Physical 3.. etc. MS Windows will adjust for multiple monitors I feel that a little better "auto" handling by VirtualBox would be of benefit to the product esp. under Windows hosts.

AFAIK the VirtualBox app doesn't know anything about the organisation (layout) of multi-monitor systems and has no control over what is displayed on which monitor. That's a properly a function of the Host Operating System.

I could see this as an interesting idea for laptop users with a bigger setup at home.

You can put this idea on the Bugtracker.

FWIW it may be possible to do this now. The number of monitors in a guest and (likely) their positions on the host monitor(s) are in the guest's .vbox 'recipe' file, and the .vbox file contents are scriptable with vboxmanage commands. If your scripting language can tap the OS's setup and tell when the external monitors are present or absent, then vboxmanage commands can feed the appropriate changes to the .vbox file then start the guest.

Difficult to pull off given VMbox has no idea of the layout of multi-monitor systems. Would love to see it with that said.