7Alternative front-ends; remote virtual machines
7.1 Introduction
As briefly mentioned in chapter 1.3, Features overview, page 12, VirtualBox has a very flexible internal design that allows you to use different front-ends to control the same virtual machines. To illustrate, you can, for example, start a virtual machine with VirtualBox’s easy-to-use graphical user interface and then stop it from the command line. With VirtualBox’s support for the Remote Desktop Protocol (VRDP), you can even run virtual machines remotely on a headless server and have all the graphical output redirected over the network.
In detail, the following front-ends are shipped in the standard VirtualBox package:
1.VirtualBox is our graphical user interface (GUI), which most of this User Manual is dedicated to describing, especially in chapter 3, Configuring virtual machines, page 44. While this is the easiest-to-use of our interfaces, it does not (yet) cover all the features that VirtualBox provides. Still, this is the best way to get to know VirtualBox initially.
2.VBoxManage is our command-line interface and is described in the next section.
3.VBoxSDL is an alternative, simple graphical front-end with an intentionally lim- ited feature set, designed to only display virtual machines that are controlled in detail with VBoxManage. This is interesting for business environments where displaying all the bells and whistles of the full GUI is not feasible. VBoxSDL is described in chapter 7.3, VBoxSDL, the simplified VM displayer, page 98.
4.Finally, VBoxHeadless is yet another front-end that produces no visible output on the host at all, but merely acts as a VRDP server. Now, even though the other graphical front-ends (VirtualBox and VBoxSDL) also have VRDP support built- in and can act as a VRDP server, this particular front-end requires no graphics support. This is useful, for example, if you want to host your virtual machines on a headless Linux server that has no X Window system installed. For details, see chapter 7.4.2, VBoxHeadless, the VRDP-only server, page 101.
If the above front-ends still do not satisfy your particular needs, it is relatively painless to create yet another front-end to the complex virtualization engine that is the core of VirtualBox, as the VirtualBox core neatly exposes all of its features in a clean API; please refer to chapter 10, VirtualBox programming interfaces, page 154.
