Hiding a guest window

[Gavin_Wilby]

Hi,

I have a couple of servers that I run in VB, but to be honest they only have small jobs to do (ones a DC, and ones and RDG), and so dont really need to see the desktop?

Is there any way that these can be run "headless" so to speak, so they load up, but unless I invoke them I dont see them??

Thanks,

Gavin.

Mac OSX 10.8.2 Core i5. 16GB RAM
VB 4.2.6 r82870
Guest OS: Server 2008R2. Windows 8.

[noteirak]

Vboxheadless

[Gavin_Wilby]

Thats great, thank you.

Can I convert a machine that already exists however? Or go through these steps and use an existing VDI?

[noteirak]

You're using the VMs available in Virtualbox already. VBoxheadless is just another "front-end" for the Virtualbox core code. So you will have access to the VMs, etc.

Just open a command prompt and type

Code: Select all

vboxmanage startvm "VMNAME" --type headless

you might need to be into the virtualbox install folder, I am not sure if vboxmanage is acessible from everywhere on OSX

[ChipMcK]

you might need to be into the virtualbox install folder, I am not sure if vboxmanage is acessible from everywhere on OSX

Code: Select all

$ echo $PATH
/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin
$ ls -ale /usr/bin/vbox*
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  77 Dec 19 09:25 /usr/bin/vboxwebsrv
$ ls -ale /usr/bin/VBox*
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  80 Dec 19 09:25 /usr/bin/VBoxAutostart
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  82 Dec 19 09:25 /usr/bin/VBoxBalloonCtrl
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  79 Dec 19 09:25 /usr/bin/VBoxHeadless
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  77 Dec 19 09:25 /usr/bin/VBoxManage
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  79 Dec 19 09:25 /usr/bin/VBoxVRDP

My system says YES. Probably the same in any *nix system.

[Gavin_Wilby]

Thats just what Im looking for, many thanks.

Works in any directory in Terminal too!