Posts tagged virtual machines
VirtualBox – Android Remote Management
Apr 18th
I wonder if Android can use animated backgrounds. If they can I will work on the following image. I’ll reduce its size and tweak it for the relatively small screen of a smartphone. If the phone cannot use an animated background I will just use the image without the animation. Ultimately I made the image in hopes that it will lead to an application, which I have begun tinkering with.
Theoretically the app will use ssh to connect to a server. The app will need to configure either password or RSA authentication. It will then use shell commands to retrieve the available virtual machines in a particular users home directory. At first it would provide the ability to start, pause, and stop them individually. Then additional functions can be added.
VirtualBox 3.1.4 – Debian Lenny SMP Instability
Mar 27th
I use an Ubuntu Karmic desktop environment for my host. I use VirtualBox with Debian Lenny for virtual machines. Most of the time virtual machines work fine with multiple processors enabled in VirtualBox, but Debian Lenny does have some instability forcing the VirtualBox configuration to use 1 processor to maintain stability. Maybe changing the kernel, particularly to an SMP kernel, is required; this would make sense. I can try that or just leave it as a single core virtual machine which is stable. I’m not really inclined to do anything because everything works fine as is.
VBoxTool – An Incredibly Useful Script
Jan 8th
Bash scripting is straight forward. There are logical and object oriented constructs like programs, and you are basically manipulating data contained in files, and using standard output to determine various tasks to be done. VBoxTool does what VBoxManage lacks. I wonder how corporations start virtual machines on boot, and manage their machines once the system is running. They clearly write their own scripts. VBoxTool is a publicly published script that does just this. I would like to extend appreciation to Mark Baaijens for the script; it is extremely useful! It completely manages my system from automating the boot process when I need to reboot the host, saving the machines when the need to be shut down, and backing them up at regular intervals with cron jobs.
Extended VirtualBox Management – VBoxTool
Dec 9th
VBoxManage, the command line tool of VirtualBox, does its job. It also has its limitations. You can starts, pause, and save virtual machines, but there is no integrated way to automate various processes. To have a virtual machine boot with the host, in headless mode, you would have to create a custom init.d boot script. A great script package, call VBoxTool, coordinates the process into a terminal app. The terminal app refereneces two configuration files in your /etc directory, and utilizes an init script to boot virtual machines. VBoxTool is at sourceforge:
http://vboxtool.sourceforge.net/
Configure the machines you want to boot in:
/etc/vboxtool/machines.conf
Any machine listed in machines.conf will boot with the host. You can view running machines with:
vboxtool showrun
Then you can also view all available machines with:
vboxtool show
Maybe this wrapper script will be integrated into VBoxManage directly; it is clear the features are useful especially for system administrators.