virtualbox.org

Hi all,

I am new to VirtualBox, coming from VMWare. Trying to drag together my beloved working environment I failed to find a tool which lets me list all my virtual machines, let me see their current states and let me perform basic maintenance actions like power up/down/suspend, see the user screen ("Shadow session") and such. Especially I need to know wether someone is logged on and if there is, how long this session has been idling.

Host is Windows, Guests are Windows.

Does such a tool exist?

Thx, Armin.

I haven't used VMWare, so I wouldn't know the exact tool(s) that you're referring to, but,

ArminLinder wrote:I failed to find a tool which lets me list all my virtual machines, let me see their current states and let me perform basic maintenance actions like power up/down/suspend, see the user screen ("Shadow session") and such.

Isn't that what the main program (VirtualBox Manager) is doing? Lists all of your VMs along with their status. You can perform similar actions to VMs that are in the same state, i.e. start a bunch of VMs all together, pause them if they're running or shut them down (again if they're running). There is also a real-time preview window of what the machine is doing, regardless of whether the VM window is shown or not.

ArminLinder wrote:Especially I need to know whether someone is logged on and if there is, how long this session has been idling.

That does not exist in VirtualBox. And what exactly do you mean by "someone"? Are the VMs shared among multiple users? Is this simple VMWare we're talking about or some sort of server version?

Take a glance here: viewforum.php?f=32 for tools folks have made for Virtualbox. Some I think are for remote management.

Thanks, guys, for your helpful replies.

What I have set up is kind of poor man's terminal server, a RAM packed workstation which runs, right now, 10 virtualboxes. Users connect via VPN, and use some application over Remote Terminal sessions.

The only problem left is to guide users to a free VM, or to the last VM he had so he can resume his session. Right now every user has a hardwired connection to one of the VMs, but I'd like to add some flexibility.

I think it yould take me about a day or two to program a little background service which reports each VMs state to another service running on the host machine, which, in turn, would report the states to a little GUI on the user computers. And I could install VNC for shadowing the sessions if someone needs my attention.

If, however, something like this does already exist, this would save me some time and efforts. I look into the community tools right after finishing this post.

Armin.