This section will give you a brief introduction to VBoxManage and how you can use it to create and operate virtual machines.
In essence, VBoxManage supports everything that our graphical user interface allows you to do with the click of a button. VBoxManage supports a lot more than that, however. It exposes really all the features of the virtualization engine, even those that cannot (yet) be accessed from the GUI.
You will need to use the command line if you want to
use a different user interface than the main GUI (for example, VBoxSDL or the VBoxHeadless server);
control some of the more advanced and experimental configuration settings for a VM.
There are two main things to keep in mind when using
VBoxManage: First,
VBoxManage must always be used with a
specific "subcommand", such as "list vms" or "createvm" or "startvm". All
the subcommands that VBoxManage supports
are described in detail in Chapterá8, VBoxManage reference.
Second, most of these subcommands require that you specify a particular virtual machine after the subcommand. There are two ways you can do this:
You can specify the VM name, as it is shown in the VirtualBox GUI. Note that if that name contains spaces, then you must enclose the entire name in double quotes (as it is always required with command line arguments that contain spaces).
For example:
VBoxManage startvm "Windows XP"
You can specify the UUID, which is the internal unique identifier that VirtualBox uses to refer to the virtual machine. Assuming that the aforementioned VM called "Windows XP" has the UUID shown below, the following command has the same effect as the previous:
VBoxManage startvm 670e746d-abea-4ba6-ad02-2a3b043810a5
You can type VBoxManage list vms to
have all currently registered VMs listed with all their settings,
including their respective names and UUIDs.
Some typical examples of how to control VirtualBox from the command line are listed below:
To create a new virtual machine from the command line and
immediately register it with VirtualBox, use
VBoxManage createvm with the
-register option,[13] like this:
$ VBoxManage createvm -name "SUSE 10.2" -register VirtualBox Command Line Management Interface Version 2.0.6 (C) 2005-2008 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved. Virtual machine 'SUSE 10.2' is created. UUID: c89fc351-8ec6-4f02-a048-57f4d25288e5 Settings file: '/home/username/.VirtualBox/Machines/SUSE 10.2/SUSE 10.2.xml'
As can be seen from the above output, a new virtual machine has been created with a new UUID and a new XML settings file.
To show the configuration of a particular VM, use
VBoxManage showvminfo; see Sectioná8.2, “VBoxManage showvminfo” for details and an example.
To change VM settings, use VBoxManage
modifyvm, e.g. as follows:
VBoxManage modifyvm "Windows XP" -memory "512MB"
For details, see Sectioná8.5, “VBoxManage modifyvm”.
To control VM operation, use one of the following:
To start a VM that is currently powered off, use
VBoxManage startvm; see Sectioná8.6, “VBoxManage startvm” for details.
To pause or save a VM that is currently running, use
VBoxManage controlvm; see Sectioná8.7, “VBoxManage controlvm” for details.