You can start VMs automatically during system boot on Linux, Oracle Solaris, and Mac OS X platforms for all users.
On Linux, the autostart service is activated by setting two
variables in /etc/default/virtualbox
. The
first one is VBOXAUTOSTART_DB
which contains
an absolute path to the autostart database directory. The
directory should have write access for every user who should be
able to start virtual machines automatically. Furthermore the
directory should have the sticky bit set. The second variable is
VBOXAUTOSTART_CONFIG
which points the service
to the autostart configuration file which is used during boot to
determine whether to allow individual users to start a VM
automatically and configure startup delays. The configuration
file can be placed in /etc/vbox
and
contains several options. One is
default_policy
which controls whether the
autostart service allows or denies to start a VM for users which
are not in the exception list. The exception list starts with
exception_list
and contains a comma separated
list with usernames. Furthermore a separate startup delay can be
configured for every user to avoid overloading the host. A
sample configuration is given below:
# Default policy is to deny starting a VM, the other option is "allow". default_policy = deny # Bob is allowed to start virtual machines but starting them # will be delayed for 10 seconds bob = { allow = true startup_delay = 10 } # Alice is not allowed to start virtual machines, useful to exclude certain users # if the default policy is set to allow. alice = { allow = false }
Any user who wants to enable autostart for individual machines must set the path to the autostart database directory with the following command:
VBoxManage setproperty autostartdbpath autostart-directory
On Oracle Solaris hosts, the Oracle VM VirtualBox autostart daemon is integrated into the SMF framework. To enable it you must point the service to an existing configuration file which has the same format as on Linux, see Section 2.22.1, “Linux: Starting the Autostart Service With init”. For example:
# svccfg -s svc:/application/virtualbox/autostart:default setprop \ config/config=/etc/vbox/autostart.cfg
When everything is configured correctly you can start the Oracle VM VirtualBox autostart service with the following command:
# svcadm enable svc:/application/virtualbox/autostart:default
For more information about SMF, see the Oracle Solaris documentation.
On Mac OS X, launchd is used to start the Oracle VM VirtualBox
autostart service. An example configuration file can be found in
/Applications/VirtualBox.app/Contents/MacOS/org.virtualbox.vboxautostart.plist
.
To enable the service copy the file to
/Library/LaunchDaemons
and change the
Disabled
key from true
to
false
. Furthermore replace the second
parameter to an existing configuration file which has the same
format as on Linux, see Section 2.22.1, “Linux: Starting the Autostart Service With init”.
To manually start the service use the following command:
# launchctl load /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.virtualbox.vboxautostart.plist
For additional information on how launchd services can be configured see:
On Windows, autostarting is implemented as a Windows service.
The service is installed for every user with their own
credentials. Before installing any autostart services on a
system you first have to define the
VBOXAUTOSTART_CONFIG
environment variable in the system variables with the path to
the autostart configuration file. The configuration file has the
same format as on Linux, see Section 2.22.1, “Linux: Starting the Autostart Service With init”,
except the user name can be specified using the following
formats: "user", "domain\user", ".\user" and "user@domain".
To enable autostarting for a particular user, a member of the administrators group must run the following command:
VBoxAutostartSvc install --user=<user> [--password-file=<password_file>]
The password file should contain the password followed by a line break. The rest of the file is ignored. The user will be asked for a password if the password file is not specified.
To disable autostarting for particular user, a member of the administrators group must run the following command:
VBoxAutostartSvc delete --user=<user>
If a user has changed their password then a member of the administrators group must either reinstall the service or change the service credentials using Windows Service Manager. Due to Windows security policies, the autostart service cannot be installed for users with empty passwords.