Headless back-end (Re: Notes on VirtualBox)

[Rich Braun]

Jarod Wilson <jarod-ajLrJawYSntWk0Htik3J/w at public.gmane.org> observed in response to the query:
>> * Can one remotely manage a VirtualBox server?
>
> Sort of. But its really more geared towards desktop use, more similar
> to vmware workstation than vmware server. You can of course ssh to
> your server and use some of the included cli tools for management, or
> run the management gui over ssh x11 forwarding.

Well Chapter 7 of the VirtualBox User manual states the following about
VBoxHeadless:

"In particular, if you are running servers whose only purpose is to
host VMs, and all your VMs are supposed to run remotely over VRDP, then
it is pointless to have a graphical user interface on the server at all"

This chapter seems to describe a mechanism for turning a base Linux install
onto an ESXi-like system, on which you'd put a lightweight 64-bit distro of
your choice as the host and then use the VRDP management package to control
one or more VM instances running on one ore more systems (perhaps a whole data
center).

> Last I knew, you can't have virtualbox auto-start VMs at boot time at
> all, without the aid of a 3rd-party initscript/config file, which
> doesn't integrate w/the management gui at all.

This chapter of the manual conflicts with your statement here; probably this
is new functionality since the last time you set up VirtualBox.  The front-end
for managing the VBoxHeadless servers is called VBoxManage.

I haven't looked at the UI but the manual section 7.1.3 is a cookbook for
scripting VM-instance creation and startup.  Even if the GUI doesn't include
auto-start, all you'd have to do is create a shell/perl script that brings up
your VMs in whatever order you want.

> For server use like this, VMware is definitely still superior.

Looks to me from this document (just download the 3.1.6 pdf from
virtualbox.org) like Sun has gone balls-to-the-wall making this product better
in the past couple of years.  By comparison, VMware Inc. has been sitting on
its laurels, presumably solving problems that I don't happen to have within my
own data center.

VMware Inc's pricing strategy is so stratospheric that I'm going down the path
of building these headless servers as soon as I can get some benchmarks run. 
I've been perpetually out of capacity on the several VMware servers I have at
work; if we can actually go open-source, such limits will completely vanish.

-rich