virtualbox.org

Hi - I had the exact same issue and I don't think that the GUI and the CLI work together.

If you power off your VMs from the GUI and then start them with the CLI and continue to manage them using only the CLI, you should not have any issues.

I'd also note that if you start up the GUI to look and the current state of your CLI-managed VMs while you're doing this, the current state of those VMs won't be reflected there.

I'm guessing this is expected, just thought I'd note it here in case anyone else has the same issue.

jamesproberts86, thanks for your thoughts. Actually, both the main Virtualbox window (GUI) and the vboxmanage command line (CLI) can operate on the same guests, because the underlying service VboxSVC.exe runs both GUI and CLI.

Other things can get in the way of running and controlling a guest smoothly. If you are having trouble starting a guest with one method then controlling it with the other method, please start a new topic and explain your problem, we'll see what we can do to help.

Locking this topic since it's a couple years old.

jamesproberts86 wrote:Hi - I had the exact same issue and I don't think that the GUI and the CLI work together.

Don't know how you got that idea. As Scott has said, the VM is spun off as its own process and it doesn't care who told it to start.

Likewise the VM management tool VBoxSVC launches whenever there's a VM that needs service, and again it doesn't care who told the VM to start.

The manager and VBoxManage tools both communicate with the VM via COM with the background VBoxSVC program, assuming of course that anything is running. Both the GUI manager and the command line VBoxManage tool are simply APIs for the underlying background processes.