Monday, July 9, 2012

Managing Virtualbox Headless

I just copied a virtual machine from a Windows 7 host to an Ubuntu host. It was rather painless:
Stop the original guest vm, copy the folder, set up a new vm, use existing hard drive, and you're up (generally). I was using smoothwall, so I needed to mimic my network configuration, but otherwise, that's about it.

The fun part was the creation of the destination vm on a headless host. Sure, I could learn some command line, but I wanted a GUI. I added Cygwin-X to my Windows 7 box,
startx (opens X)
xhost+ (allows connections to X)

Opened putty with X11 forwarding to my linux box, then in putty
VirtualBox

tweak tweak tweak

back in putty
vboxheadless -s vmName &

close everything, go on with life.


No comments:

Blog Archive