VBoxHeadless - Running Virtual Machines With VirtualBox 4.0 On A Headless Fedora 14 Server

This guide explains how you can run virtual machines with VirtualBox 4.0 on a headless Fedora 14 server. Normally you use the VirtualBox GUI to manage your virtual machines, but a server does not have a desktop environment. Fortunately, VirtualBox comes with a tool called VBoxHeadless that allows you to connect to the virtual machines over a remote desktop connection, so there's no need for the VirtualBox GUI.

I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

 

1 Preliminary Note

I have tested this on a Fedora 14 server (host system) with the IP address 192.168.0.100 where I'm logged in as a normal user (user name admin in this example) instead of as root.

If you only have a root account, but no normal user account, create one as follows (user admin, group admin)...

# groupadd admin
# useradd -d /home/admin -m -g admin -s /bin/bash admin

... create a password for the new user...

# passwd admin

... and log in as that user.

 

2 Installing VirtualBox

To install VirtualBox 4.0 on our Fedora 14 server, we need root privileges, therefore we run

$ su

Then we install the dependencies for VirtualBox 4.0 as follows:

# yum groupinstall 'Development Tools'

# yum groupinstall 'Development Libraries'

# yum install SDL kernel-devel kernel-headers dkms

Next we pick the right VirtualBox package from http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Linux_Downloads; pick the i386 or AMD64 package (depending on your architecture) for Fedora 14 ("Laughlin") (you can find out your architecture by running

# uname -m

The output on my test system is

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