virtualbox.org

Hey all

Anyone know if it is possible to start a virtual machine from terminal. The reason is that I want a (physical) server running with a base ubuntu server installation. On this server I want a virtual machine functioning as a FTP server (a Debian installation). If I want to remotely restart the ubuntu server, then I also want to be able to get the virtual FTP server going... All this I want to do through ssh (my server is not that power full, so I want avoid using the GUI)

Is this possible??

Yup and their are lots of examples posted. The core to this are the VBoxHeadless and VBoxManage commands. There are two ways that I use and both have wrapper scripts. The first is to use nohup VBox... and the second is what I do for my LAMP VMs which I run headless which is to run an at job to run VBoxHeadless -s vmName -v off. My script uses the heredoc operator to allow me to pass the VM name as a parameter. On my todo list is a shutdown script which does a controlvm poweroff of running machines and then automatically restart them on the next startup.

Search the manual for the bold terms for more details.