Virtualbox and VRDP

[Hubert Tournier]

Hello


Jonathan Stewart-3 wrote:
> 
> I just installed virtualbox on my server without X11 support intending 
> to run it headless and now I find that the Virtual Remote Display 
> Protocol support is only available in the closed source version.
> 

For Unix-like VMs, this is not a problem provided that you enable an SSH
server in order to do your remote administration

For graphical VMs (Windows...), I suppose that you could try the VBoxSDL
frontend with remote X-Window display, but I haven't tested this yet.


Jonathan Stewart-3 wrote:
> 
> Are there any other options that would allow me to set up a VM remotely 
> without installing X?  I suppose I could set up a VM locally and then 
> copy it to my server once it's configured for remote ssh access but that 
> would involve copying several GB over the internet, a rather slow 
> process on my connection.
> 

I described a whole process to do that (which I called Virtual to Remote
Physical - V2RP) at the following address:
http://www.frbsd.org/fr/dedibsd/index.html
http://www.frbsd.org/fr/dedibsd/index.html 
(sorry it's only in French, but you should get the overall idea with an
online translator and the screen captures).

The key part of this is an undocumented VirtualBox command which will enable
you to convert a VDI with the OS that you want to remote install to an hard
disk image:
VBoxManage internalcommands converttoraw image.vdi image.raw

Then you compress that with the best available tool on your target system...

Then you start your target system using some sort of live CD (most dedicated
servers providers offer this as a rescue system)...

And you paste your hard disk image to the remote hard drive. For example
under the Ubuntu Live rescue system of my current provider:
wget -O - htpp://URL/freebsd8.raw.bz2 | bunzip2 | dd of=/dev/sda bs=1M

As a rule of thumb, you can count from 300 to 600 MB for a compressed image
of a full FreeBSD install (16 to 20 GB) that you want to "paste" on your
remote server.

Usually, I don't configure the /home filesystem initially, and do it after
the remote server has been installed by creating a new partition-slice in
order to recover all the remaining space.

I have some scripts which automate the whole process for FreeBSD hosts,
which I intend to release in a few weeks.

I've been using this since last summer in order to build a private hybrid
cloud for my company using FreeBSD and VirtualBox. Works really fine for us,
thanks to the efforts of the VirtualBox porting team!

Best regards,
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