virtualbox.org

Here's my situation: I have Small Business Server 2008 running on a Windows 7 host. The Windows 7 host is used for regular user applications. I put the SBS on this machine as it was the most powerful one we had (SBS requires a quad-core and 4 GB memory at minimum). I have virtualbox running on my administrator account. I'll leave it logged in, and switch users so that other non-admins can use the PC. The problem the users do not realize the VM is running and sometimes restart the PC (restarting the PC is always the thing people tend to do when the PC isn't working right). I've created a batch file in group policy to have the VM save state upon shutdown, and start it when the PC starts. However, I do not want the VM to start on a non-admin account. I want this VM running in the background without user knowledge, and where a user can't get to it.

How can I accomplish the above?

How about putting a big sticker on the monitor "DO NOT SHUT THIS PC DOWN BEFORE CONTACTING ME!" with bright red letters? That's the original "group" policy that inspired Microsoft .

But on a more serious note, it seems that you want to have VirtualBox as a service in case that other things (power down) happen that will force the server to reboot. There is a SourceForge project, as well as a dedicated thread about this.

Perfect. I was doing a few searches for running VB as a service, but didn't find what I was looking for (found one that couldn't shut down VMs gracefully).