Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Additional device drivers will be present to allow the guest machine access
to other host resources such as disks, network controllers, and audio and USB
devices. In reality, the hypervisor actually does little work. Rather, most of the
interesting work in running the guest machine is done in the guest process. Thus
the host's resource controls and scheduling methods can be used to control the
guest machine behavior.
In addition to the kernel modules, several processes on the host are used to sup-
port running guests. All of these processes are started automatically when needed.
■
VBoxSVC
is the VirtualBox service process. It keeps track of all virtual ma-
chines that are running on the host. It is started automatically when the first
guest boots.
■
vboxzoneacess
is a daemon unique to Solaris that allows the VirtualBox
device to be accessed from an Oracle Solaris Container.
■
VBoxXPCOMIPCD
is the XPCOM process used on non-Windows hosts for inter-
process communication between guests and the management applications.
On Windows hosts, the native COM services are used.
■
VirtualBox
is the process that actually runs the guest virtual machine when
started. One of these processes exists for every guest that is running on the
host. If host resource limits are desired for the guest, this process enforces
those controls.
There are two primary methods for a user to interact with VirtualBox: a simple
graphical user interface (GUI) and a very complete and detailed command-line
interface (CLI). The GUI allows the user to create and manage guest virtual ma-
chines as well as set most of the common configuration options. When a guest
machine is started from this user interface, a graphical console window opens on
the host that allows the user to interact with the guest as if it were running on
real hardware. To start the graphical interface, type the command
VirtualBox
at any shell prompt. On Oracle Solaris, this command is found in
/usr/bin
and
is available to all users.
The CLI is the
VBoxManage
command.
VBoxManage
has many subcommands
and options, some of which are discussed in the following sections. To get a list of
all
VBoxManage
options, just type
VBoxManage
at any shell prompt. Without any
command arguments,
VBoxManage
will respond with a list of all valid options.
When a
VBoxManage
command successfully completes, it will print out a banner
similar to the one in the following example:
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