Setup VirtualBox as a Service in Linux

Posted on October 29, 2008 (edited July 18, 2012) by Brendan Kidwell

http://www.glump.net/howto/virtualization/how-to-setup-virtualbox-as-a-service-in-linux

I run VirtualBox on my office desktop to provide not only a Windows desktop environment for sticky Windows-requiring apps, but also to provide MS SQL Server for my web development stack of JRun, ColdFusion, and MS SQL Server. As such, it would be useful to have an init script that starts and stops VirtualBox automatically when the host system boots up and shuts down. That way, I don’t have to think about manually starting VirtualBox before I can interact with my web development environment, and this is particularly useful if I have to work remotely after calling in to ask my office mate to start my computer.

This guide shows you how to setup a virtual machine hosted by VirtualBox on a Linux host. The guest OS can be anything. The guest will be configured to start or resume when the host boots and hibernate (suspend execution, save to disk, and terminate) when the host shuts down. The guest can be started and stopped from the command prompt as well. I have only tested this setup on Linux Mint 13 (based on Ubuntu 12.04), but it should work fine on any Linux that uses init.d scripts to start and stop services.

Alternate version available:

[Spanish] Crear servicio para VirtualBox — based on this page, by Carlos Gacimartín. Thanks Carlos!

10 Oct 2012: According to the VirtualBox manual, these instructions have been superseded by new built-in functionality as of version 4.2. I haven’t tried the built-in method yet, but it should work better than my instructions on this web page.

Prepare Your VirtualBox Virtual Machine

Install VirtualBox in the usual way. Create your virtual machine. In particular I recommend these settings, but YMMV:

NAT Network Connectivity from Host

The reason I use NAT networking is because I feel it’s easier to manage than any other networking. My network admin doesn’t see any new mysterious MAC and IP addresses appearing on the network, and I know exactly what ports on the virtual machine are exposed to the outside world. If you prefer, you can use bridged networking instead.

Save your virtual machine, start it (in the GUI) and install your guest OS and VirtualBox Guest Additions. It’s important that you install every kind of remote access you’ll need, since the virtual machine’s screen won’t actually reside on your real desktop when you run the virtual machine as a service. I’ve found that VirtualBox’s RDP server has some issues with catching screen updates, so I like to enable Windows’ Remote Desktop server and forward it from an alternate port in VirtualBox’s NAT.

(Aside: Most people wouldn’t think of it for a Windows guest, but I find the SSH server provided by Cygwin quite useful, especially for no-nonsense SFTP file transfers. If you choose to use it, you can copy your host’s/etc/ssh/ssh_host_* to your guest’s Cygwin /etc/ folder and that will prevent SSH clients from complaining about different keys being used on different ports on your host IP address.)

To configure port forwarding in VirtualBox’s NAT, go to Settings for your chosen VM, then Network → Adapter (n) (the one using NAT) → Advanced → Port Forwarding. Here are examples from my setup.