Headless VirtualBox

The adventure continues

After I packed full my new server with docker containers, it was time to look for something new to do with it. I decided to install VirtualBox because it will be useful for running Vagrant for learning Ansible (book recommendation Ansible for DevOps by Jeff Geerling)

Ubuntu how I (not) missed you

First we’ll have to install VirtualBox, but this is not just a simple apt install virtualbox, nooo. You should use the official Oracle repo for that.

Get the gpg-key

sudo wget -q https://www.virtualbox.org/download/oracle_vbox_2016.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add -

Add the Oracle repo to your sources.list

deb [arch=amd64 signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/oracle-virtualbox-2016.gpg] https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian jammy contrib%

Install

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sudo apt update
sudo apt install virtualbox-7.0

Check the installation

sudo systemctl status vboxdrv

Add your user to the vboxusers group

sudo usermod -aG vboxusers $USER

Headless stuff

I want to use VirtualBox in headless mode so some more black magic with the proper Extension Pack is needed.

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VBOXVER=`vboxmanage -v | cut -dr -f1`
wget -P /tmp https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/$VBOXVER/Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-$VBOXVER.vbox-extpack
vboxmanage extpack install /tmp/Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-$VBOXVER.vbox-extpack

It’s finished. Or is it?

Now the headless VirtualBox installation is complete, let’s do something interesting with it, finally. I wanted to run MikroTik CHR (Cloud Hosted Router) for some time. The reason being that based on my experience with updating my live system on my MikroTik hAP AC3: major version upgrades are a pain in the ass. Everything is working, but not really, last time I had to do a lot of debugging when upgrading from 6.x to 7.8.

So let’s install MikroTik CHR! It’s free for use, the only drawback is that without a license it will throttle all interfaces to 1 Mbps, but that’s not an issue for me, this is just for learning and testing.

Creating a virtual machine in headless mode

This was somewhat straightforward and at the same time painful, so in the end I went with installing phpvirtualbox. In Docker. Obviously. But that will be a later post, it has its own quirks.

So. Creating a CHR VM with 64 MB of RAM, a disk to store the system and starting it:

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vboxmanage createvm --ostype Linux_64 --basefolder "/vm/chr" --register --name "CHR 7.8"
vboxmanage modifyvm "CHR 7.8" --memory 64 --nic1 bridged
vboxmanage storagectl "CHR 7.8" --name "SATA" --add sata
vboxmanage storageattach "CHR 7.8" --storagectl SATA --port 0 --type hdd --medium "/vm/chr/CHR 7.8/chr-7.8.vdi"
vboxmanage startvm "CHR 7.8" --type headless

Getting info about the running VM:

vboxmanage showvminfo "CHR 7.8"

Shutting down and saving the state of the VM:

vboxmanage controlvm "CHR 7.8" savestate

Conclusion

It’s alive!