Date: Wed, 13 Jan 2010 12:51:38 -0800 (PST) From: Hubert Tournier <hubert@frbsd.org> To: freebsd-emulation@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Virtualbox and VRDP Message-ID: <27151781.post@talk.nabble.com> In-Reply-To: <4AAD95C2.7040907@kc8onw.net> References: <4AAD95C2.7040907@kc8onw.net>
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Hello Jonathan Stewart-3 wrote: > > I just installed virtualbox on my server without X11 support intending > to run it headless and now I find that the Virtual Remote Display > Protocol support is only available in the closed source version. > For Unix-like VMs, this is not a problem provided that you enable an SSH server in order to do your remote administration For graphical VMs (Windows...), I suppose that you could try the VBoxSDL frontend with remote X-Window display, but I haven't tested this yet. Jonathan Stewart-3 wrote: > > Are there any other options that would allow me to set up a VM remotely > without installing X? I suppose I could set up a VM locally and then > copy it to my server once it's configured for remote ssh access but that > would involve copying several GB over the internet, a rather slow > process on my connection. > I described a whole process to do that (which I called Virtual to Remote Physical - V2RP) at the following address: http://www.frbsd.org/fr/dedibsd/index.html http://www.frbsd.org/fr/dedibsd/index.html (sorry it's only in French, but you should get the overall idea with an online translator and the screen captures). The key part of this is an undocumented VirtualBox command which will enable you to convert a VDI with the OS that you want to remote install to an hard disk image: VBoxManage internalcommands converttoraw image.vdi image.raw Then you compress that with the best available tool on your target system... Then you start your target system using some sort of live CD (most dedicated servers providers offer this as a rescue system)... And you paste your hard disk image to the remote hard drive. For example under the Ubuntu Live rescue system of my current provider: wget -O - htpp://URL/freebsd8.raw.bz2 | bunzip2 | dd of=/dev/sda bs=1M As a rule of thumb, you can count from 300 to 600 MB for a compressed image of a full FreeBSD install (16 to 20 GB) that you want to "paste" on your remote server. Usually, I don't configure the /home filesystem initially, and do it after the remote server has been installed by creating a new partition-slice in order to recover all the remaining space. I have some scripts which automate the whole process for FreeBSD hosts, which I intend to release in a few weeks. I've been using this since last summer in order to build a private hybrid cloud for my company using FreeBSD and VirtualBox. Works really fine for us, thanks to the efforts of the VirtualBox porting team! Best regards, -- View this message in context: http://old.nabble.com/Virtualbox-and-VRDP-tp25429038p27151781.html Sent from the freebsd-emulation mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
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