VirtualBox Headless mode

I use VirtualBox and do some testing and learning with multiple machines running at once.

Usually those machines are servers so I don’t really need the GUI since I connecting to them using SSH clinet.

When VirtualBox is installed you’ll see VBoxManage executable (vboxmanage is also there as alias) which is CLI tool that allows you to interact with your VMs.

Here is a command how you can start VM in headless mode:

vboxmanage startvm <vm name> --type headless

Pretty simple.

To shutdown the VM run this:

vboxmanage controlvm <vm name> poweroff

That’s it. You can also run vboxmanage without any params to get list of all options/actions it supports.

Have fun.