[OpenIndiana-discuss] running VirtualBox headless

[Jim Klimov]

On 2013-06-25 06:11, Jan Owoc wrote:
> 2) I was able to get the machine to autostart using SMF, but it was a
> lot of work; should I expand that section of the wiki with my
> findings?


Did you use the stock (VirtualBox 4.2.x provided) SMF scripts, or
my vboxsvc project from SourceForge? If documentation or usability
of the latter is lacking, I'd like to know ;) I do firmly believe
that the stock methods are too linux-initscript-oriented and are
seriously lacking regarding SMF (not using its full potential),
at least as of currently released versions; still, a chapter on
their usage (and limitations) might be useful in our Wiki.

 > I have no idea how to get it to "autoshutdown" when the
 > machine is shutting down.

In particular, for vboxsvc you can set a number of vm/stop_method
values that result in different actions sent to the VM, such as
savestate, poweroff, acpipowerbutton, poweroff-graceful (first an
acpipowerbutton, then after a timeout - an ungraceful poweroff,
if VM is still running).

Also, based on some reports, VirtualBox 4.1.x may be more stable
than 4.2.x. In particular, I myself had problems with clock skew
on 4.2.x which made VMs unusable after about a week of uptime
(on a Windows host server, however) which were resolved after a
"downgrade" to 4.1.24 or whichever was latest; got over 2 months
of VM uptime last time I checked. Sometimes the clock skews are
objectively related to host loads, sometimes they are just a bug
of a particular version and not explicable otherwise (i.e. when
VMs lag on a load-less host).

HTH,
//Jim Klimov