VirtualBox, an open-source virtual machine host, is getting closer to what VMware Server was a few years ago. While VirtualBox is made first for an interactive GUI, it can be run in "headless mode" on a server, and now a few tools make it easy to manage it.
First, a command-line tool called VBoxTool that helps batch start and stop multiple VirtualBox instances as a single service. This is particularly useful for script that runs on startup and that saves the machines states at shutdown. VirtualBox's own command-line interface still has to be used to create and configure new machines, but once added the VBoxTool it becomes part of your "server".
Once your VirtualBox server is running, the second tool you can use is a nice web interface called phpVirtualBox. It provides a good view of all your virtual machine in a web browser, and let's you interactively start or stop them. With VirtualBox's own extension pack that provides RDP remote access to the virtual machine's screen, the phpVirtualBox site lets you access them through a web browser. For commercial environments (where you're not allowed to use the personal-use-only extension), the latest source of VirtualBox has a VNC server extension, which could be combined with NoVNC to access using a web browser if installing a VNC client is too much troublesome.
Published on July 13, 2012 at 21:16 EDT
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