running VM's as a service

[Chris Gilligan]

I would love to see headless service support so the VM's can be
started up and shut-down with the host pc. I understand this is not
exactly something phpvbox should do on its own but there are already
projects out there for windows (http://vboxvmservice.sourceforge.net/)
and i assume a similar project for Linux that would be great if they
could be controlled or configured via the phpvbox UI.

I know that you prob have a small windows user base than Linux but it
really is a feature that is badly needed on windows and i would think
it would be a feature much easier added to Linux with just some
changes to the start-up scripts.

Is there any chance someone could implement this? It would be such a
useful feature for a headless system.

[John Haverlack]

Greetings,

I have implemented just such a startup script as part of
VBoxDashBoard. (http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/vboxdashboard) It
allows you to specify startup and shutdown order for guest VMs upon
booting or halting a VM Host.

Installation instructions for CentOS are at:
http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/vboxdashboard/wiki/install/centos55-node

Here is the start up Script:
http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/vboxdashboard/browser/v0.2/trunk/node/root/etc/rc.d/init.d/vbdb-boot

Here is the config file:
http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/vboxdashboard/browser/v0.2/trunk/node/root/etc/vboxdashboard/vbdb-guest-boot.json

Unfortunately I haven't documented this well yet. There are a few
other details but I would be happy to provide them if you decide to
test it out.

[Chris Gilligan]

That is exactly what i am looking for but on windows.  I can see many advantages of using linux problem is i am not a good enough user of linux to be sure all the hotplug estata and usb drives will work correctly and ntfs will function correctly as i know there use to be issues but i assume that is fixed now.

Maybe i could ISCSI the HD's directly into the VM's to handle the windows file systems but not sure how that would go with my hotplug drives as i want to be able to plug in and out my data drives where some guests may be storing data but will not be their main drives.  Just data dump drives.

CHris