wonderful world of programming

I know I’m going to need to run a headless virtual machine using Virtual Box sometime in the future, so here’s a couple of commands on how to run and shutdown a headless VM. For all of these commands, replace with the name of the VM.

To start the VM headless, use this command:

VBoxManage startvm "<name>" --type headless

To power off the VM (allowing a proper shutdown), use this command:

VBoxManage controlvm "<name>" acpipowerbutton

To forcefully shutdown a VM, use this command:

VBoxManage controlvm "<name>" poweroff