Multiple VMs run on multiple hosts, same central VirtualBox.

[eohrnberger]

I have 3 Gentoo Linux machines each with the same version of VBox installed, 4.3.28.

Each of these 3 hosts has some locally attached storage containing the VBox images that those hosts are most likely to run. Call this host the VMs primary location.

Each of these storage pools is NFS mounted and accessible on all the other hosts. All the storage pools on all hosts are consistently named. Regardless of which host is running any particular VM, all the paths to all the files are exactly the same.

One of the hosts and it's storage pool contains the central VM registry of all the VMs (VirtualBox.xml), and this is where each other hosts ~/.VirtualBox directory is symbolically linked to.

On occasion, when a host is already loaded by running 1 or 2 VMs (or something else), another VM needs to be run, it can be run on another host, with that host accessing the VBox image file across NFS. Yes, there is a bit of a performance penalty, even in a Gbit switched network, but it's not too bad, especially if not used very often.

One thing that keeps happening, the VirtualBox.xml file seems to 'empty' itself (all the defined VMs disappear) on either one, or both, of the hosts that are accessing the VirtualBox.xml file across NFS.

This is fine, as the most frequent use is to run the VMs headless on the hosts, and access the VMs across the network using RDP.

From what I've been able to figure out, it's only the VirtualBox GUI on the hosts ever writes the VirtualBox.xml file, and when that happens, sometimes the other hosts lose concurrency to that file, and return a blank VirtualBox.xml, resulting in no VMs defined.

Once concurrency to the VirtualBox.xml file is lost by a host, is there a way to 'reset' the host so that it regains concurrency to the VirtualBox.xml file?

I've tried removing and re-adding the vbox kernel modules, but that didn't help. Any other ideas of what I might be able to try?

[eohrnberger]

Just ran across RemoteBox. I wonder if that'll suffer from the same issues or not. Hmm.

[eohrnberger]

Well, remotebox didn't work as well as you'd think. Trying phpvirtualbox, perhaps that'll work better.