Running VirtualBox in Headless Mode

At work I have ReviewBoard running on VirtualBox on one of my development machines.  This has been working great but every once in awhile I accidentally close the VirtualBox console because it’s sitting in my taskbar:

VirtualBox in Taskbar

I remember reading about a ‘headless’ mode in the VirtualBox documentation.  This will setup VirtualBox running as a RDP server – it can run ‘invisibly’ and you can connect via Windows Remote Desktop to intact with the system.

You can either configure the remote settings within the VirtualBox GUI:

Remote Display Dialog

Or pass them in through the command line.  I went this route and created a batch file called start-reviewboard.bat:

REM  Batch script to start VirtualBox instance of ReviewBoard in headless mode
REM  Connect via RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) to port 8000

"C:\Program Files\sun\VirtualBox\VBoxHeadless.exe" -startvm ReviewBoard -p 8000

This starts VirtualBox in headless mode (VBoxHeadless.exe), starts my ReviewBoard vm, and sets up RDP (port 8000).

You can run this script and it should start VirtualBox – but you will still be left with a DOS box sitting there in your taskbar. Turns out it is fairly easy to write a small script to run a batch file silently as well. I created start-reviewboard.vbs:

REM 0 = hide window, 1 = show window (useful for debugging)

Set WshShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
WshShell.Run chr(34) & "D:\scripts\start-reviewboard.bat" & Chr(34), 0
Set WshShell = Nothing

You use this script to run your batch file and pass in a parameter to hide the window (0). I’d recommend setting that to 1 while you get things setup so you can see what is going on and once you have worked out the kinks set it to 0.

When you run it – you should get a DOS window and a message “Listening on port 8000” (or whatever you set the port to). I changed the port to 8000 as I assume Windows is already using 3389 (default RDP port).

To connect I simply start Remote Desktop Connection and enter localhost:8000.

To stop VirtualBox simply issue the following command:

VBoxManage controlvm YOUR_VM_NAME poweroff

VirtualBox Virtual Directories Explained (screencast)

For More Information on Shared Folders (Virtual Directories):

• VirtualBox documentation on Shared Folders
• Alternate method of sharing folders
• Ubuntu docs on shared folders

Exporting A VirtualBox Image (To Reduce It’s Size)

I needed to move one of my VirtualBox setups to another computer but the disk image was huge and wouldn’t fit on my thumbdrive. Digging around in the VirtualBox settings I noticed an import/export function.

VirtualBox Export/Import

The original disk image was 4.13GB. Exporting it resulted in two files that totalled 1.75GB! That will easily fit on my 2GB thumbdrive (or Dropbox).

Exporting (and importing) is a straighforward process. Select export – you will be given the opportunity to define some configuration values for your machine, then simply define the export filename. Import is the reverse – select import – location you exported file and proceed. Exporting my 4GB disk took about 25-30 minutes.