Autostart of Guest OS...

[monkmst]

Hello All,

I wanted to know if there is a way to auto start a VM?
The scenario is like this...
The power goes and the machines shuts down. I have set the host machine to start automatically in an event of power failure or unexpected failures. The host machine is set to enter credentials for logging in.
Is there a way to start the VM without me logging in and then starting the guest OS?
I am using Windows 2008 Standard Server as the host and Windows XP Professional as the guest OS. Just running them for some services that are incompatible above Windows XP.

Thanks in advance.

Monk

[Perryg]

Search the forum about this. There are several discussions and dedicated threads.
But you should be more concerned about loosing power than starting the VirtualBox guest as a service.
Loosing power has been known to kill the guest beyond repair. Make sure you do backups of the virtualbox.xml on a regular basis

[monkmst]

Thanks Perry,

This is a scenario that I came up with so that I have the event procedures in place (documented), I do have enough UPS to last me for about 6 hours and then a generator that lasts up to another 12 hours so I am almost covered there...
I searched the forum but most of the answers are related to Linux as hosts rather than windows and that too in a domain environment. Moreover, I am running my first virtual machine to provide specific services as I have mentioned previously because IT could not wait for all the vendors to fix their issues with Win 7 and Win Server 2K8 as our planned migration from Win XP had been held up for ages.
I do have scheduled backups setup, There is not much of configuration changes that goes on with the guest so if I loose the current setup any of the previous backups would work without any issues.

I'll try and search in the forums again.

Thanks for your support again.

Monk.

[Perryg]

http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=4762
It's the second topic down in Windows as host