I have many Virtual box machines in my Ubuntu12.04, each time i shutdown or reboot i have to start them one by one.
I wanna a help in writing script for automatically autostart the VBox machines when booting.
You can use the VirtualBox Auto-start service. A good tutorial describing how to do this is posted on the "Life of a Geek Admin" blog.
The following steps are adapted from the linked blog post:
First you need to create the file /etc/default/virtualbox and add a few variables.
VBOXAUTOSTART_DB which contains an absolute path to the autostart database directory and
VBOXAUTOSTART_CONFIG which contains the location of the autostart config settings. The file should look similar to this:
# virtualbox defaults file
VBOXAUTOSTART_DB=/etc/vbox
VBOXAUTOSTART_CONFIG=/etc/vbox/vbox.cfg
Now we need to create the /etc/vbox/vbox.cfg file and add
# Default policy is to deny starting a VM, the other option is "allow".
default_policy = deny
# Create an entry for each user allowed to run autostart
myuserid = {
allow = true
}
Note: If the filename vbox.cfg doesn't work above, try naming it autostart.cfg.
If you are the only user you can just add the line default_policy = allow to the vbox.cfg file.
Set permissions on directory to the vboxuser group and make sure users can write to the directory as well as sticky bit.
sudo chgrp vboxusers /etc/vbox
sudo chmod 1775 /etc/vbox
Add each of the users to the vboxusers group.
sudo usermod -a -G vboxusers USERNAME
(replace USERNAME with the username)
NOTE: If you have changed group permissions for the current user, log out and back in again to refresh the permissions. (credit @kR105)
Every user who wants to enable autostart for individual machines has to set the path to the autostart database directory with
VBoxManage setproperty autostartdbpath /etc/vbox
and enable autostart for an individual VM with
VBoxManage modifyvm <uuid|vmname> --autostart-enabled on
This will create a myuserid.start file in /etc/vbox directory
Now restart the vboxautostart-service to read in the changes.
sudo service vboxautostart-service restart
Reboot your system and your VM should start
