Control VirtualBox VMs via Batch
VirtualBox GUI is slow for repetitive tasks such as starting & stopping virtual machines. In addition, some tasks such as starting VMs headless is not possible at all.
On the other hand, VBoxManage.exe with its 842 lines of unsorted help output
is unwieldy for everyday use.
To get around both limitation I like to keep a few batch files on my desktop for recurring tasks.
Start
One script for each virtual machine to start it:
:: headless requires VirtualBox >5.0
"%ProgramFiles%\Oracle\VirtualBox\VBoxManage.exe" startvm "Mars" --type headless
You can use --type gui for the default behaviour of showing a GUI window
for the VM, instead.
Stop All
Before shutting down your host machine, or to save on battery power, you want to stop all machines:
"%ProgramFiles%\Oracle\VirtualBox\VBoxManage.exe" controlvm "Mars" acpipowerbutton
"%ProgramFiles%\Oracle\VirtualBox\VBoxManage.exe" controlvm "Merkury" acpipowerbutton
:: additional VMs...
Instead of using acpipowerbutton which performs a clean shutdown, you could
also use savestate to save the current VM state to disk, to restart it later.
The same start batch script will work for both modes.
Status
These scripts allow me to not run VirtualBox GUI at all. The downside is that I sometimes forget which state my VMs are in, running vs. shutdown.
A simple status script helps me to check on my VMs without starting the GUI.
"%ProgramFiles%\Oracle\VirtualBox\VBoxManage.exe" list runningvms
@pause