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7 Alternative front-ends; remote
virtual machines
7.1 Introduction
As briefly mentioned in chapter 1.3, Features overview, page 13, 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, Starting out with
VirtualBox, page 31. 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 92.
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 7.4.1, VBoxHeadless, the VRDP-only server, page 94.
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 143.
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