Table of Contents
As briefly mentioned in Sectioná1.3, “Features overview”, VirtualBox has a very flexible internal design that allows you to use different front-ends to control the same virtual machines. To illustrate, you can, for example, start a virtual machine with VirtualBox's easy-to-use graphical user interface and then stop it from the command line. With VirtualBox's support for the Remote Desktop Protocol (VRDP), you can even run virtual machines remotely on a headless server and have all the graphical output redirected over the network.
In detail, the following front-ends are shipped in the standard VirtualBox package:
VirtualBox is our graphical
user interface (GUI), which most of this User Manual is dedicated to
describing, especially in Chapterá3, Starting out with VirtualBox. While
this is the easiest-to-use of our interfaces, it does not (yet)
cover all the features that VirtualBox provides. Still, this is the
best way to get to know VirtualBox initially.
VBoxManage is our
command-line interface and is described in the next section.
VBoxSDL is an alternative,
simple graphical front-end with an intentionally limited feature
set, designed to only display virtual machines that are controlled
in detail with VBoxManage. This is
interesting for business environments where displaying all the bells
and whistles of the full GUI is not feasible.
VBoxSDL is described in Sectioná7.3, “VBoxSDL, the simplified VM displayer”.
Finally, VBoxHeadless is yet
another front-end that produces no visible output on the host at
all, but merely acts as a VRDP server. Now, even though the other
graphical front-ends (VirtualBox and VBoxSDL) also have VRDP support
built-in and can act as a VRDP server, this particular front-end
requires no graphics support. This is useful, for example, if you
want to host your virtual machines on a headless Linux server that
has no X Window system installed. For details, see Sectioná7.4.1, “VBoxHeadless, the VRDP-only server”.
If the above front-ends still do not satisfy your particular needs, it is relatively painless to create yet another front-end to the complex virtualization engine that is the core of VirtualBox, as the VirtualBox core neatly exposes all of its features in a clean COM/XPCOM API. This API is described in Chapterá10, VirtualBox programming interfaces.