7 Alternative front-ends; remote virtual machines
hosts the default RDP port (3389) could be already used by the Windows RDP server,
in this case you should choose another port for your VM(s).
You should specify -N command line option with rdesktop to be able to use
NumPadkeys: rdesktop -N host_system_ip.
With VirtualBox, the graphical user interface, the VRDP server is disabled by
default, but can easily be enabled on a per-VMbasis either with the VirtualBox GUI or
with VBoxManage:
VBoxManage modifyvm <vmname> --vrdp on
If you use VBoxHeadless (described below), VRDP support will be automatically
enabled.
Additional settings for modifyvm are --vrdpport and --vrdpauthtype; see
chapter 8.5,VBoxManage modifyvm, page 107 for details.
7.4.1 VBoxHeadless, the VRDP-only server
While the VRDP server that is built into the VirtualBox GUI is perfectly capable of
running virtual machines remotely,it is not convenient to have to run VirtualBox if
younever want to have VMs displayed locally in the first place. In particular,if you are
running servers whose only purpose is to host VMs, and all your VMs are supposed to
run remotely over VRDP,then it is pointless to have a graphical user interface on the
server at all – especially since, on a Linux or Solaris host, VirtualBox comes with
dependencies on the Qt and SDL libraries, which is inconvenient if you would rather
not have the X Window system on your server at all.
VirtualBoxtherefore comes with yet another front-end that produces no visible out-
put on the host at all, but instead only delivers VRDP data. With VirtualBox 1.6, this
“headless server” is now aptly called VBoxHeadless. (In previous versions, it was
called VBoxVRDP. Forthe sake of backwards compatibility, the VirtualBox installation
still installs an executable with that name as well.)
Tostart a virtual machine with VBoxHeadless, you have two options:
•You can use VBoxManage startvm <vmname> --type vrdp. The extra
--type option causes the VirtualBox core to use VBoxHeadless as the front-
end to the internal virtualization engine.
•The recommended way,however, is to use VBoxHeadless directly,as follows:
VBoxHeadless --startvm <uuid|name>
This is the recommended way, because when starting the headless interface
through VBoxManage, you will not be able to view or log messages that
VBoxHeadless may have output on the console. Especially in case of startup
errors, such output might be desirable for problem diagnosis.
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