14 thoughts on - Systemd And VirtualBox

• I deliberately bailed on VirtualBox when we moved to C7, as KVM offered everything I needed with less hassle.

  I take it you’ve considered switching?

  jh

• Considered, very briefly. I have had great success and stability with running VirtualBox on both CentOS 5 & 6 for the few Windoze apps that my clients need to run and have up on a server 24×7. The set ups I am using have been running reliably for over 8 years and remote manged with zero issues – HUGE thanks to the CentOS team for an awesome OS system delivery Thus, I have simply installed the latest VirtualBox on CentOS 7 and gone from there. I was aware that systemd existed and deliberately waited until this year to upgrade the hardware and OS, thinking issues like this should have been sorted by now. Are there any good tutorial / howtos for KVM? Although at this point I
  am back on another continent and reluctant to shift to KVM when over 20
  hours fly time away from the server.

• Sure.

  You just get the win of running a setup Redhat test, rather than a setup they don’t have any great interest in.

  I’d probably start with:

  https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/7/html/Virtualization_Deployment_and_Administration_Guide/

  jh

• Why would that be an issue? It’s not Xen where you have to boot into a special kernel … it’s just the ordinary kernel. In fact I’d be surprised if you had to reboot at all, you should just have to install the virtualization group (along with virt-tools and virt-manager to make your life easier, dont’ forget to install fonts if using virt-manager over X
  forward and wanting to avoid little boxes instead of characters) and be up and running.

• thanks James. I have started working through the document you indicated and will see how it goes. It may take a few days to sort out enough time. BTW, will I be able to use the Windows10 image file that VirtualBox uses?
  Is there a tool that changes the format of the vm image if its different?
  Or am I faced with a new Windoze install and installing the Windoze Apps all over again?
  That may be an issue as the Windoze application is quite complex and the last two times I have installed it, I had to use the app provider’s help line to solve Windoze 10 issues as the default install has some things that need changing in order for their app to work.

• –17vw3U7nfkmumR6RSdixDR4BcmRAnVC6r Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252
  Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

  You can convert a Virtual Box VM into a KVM VM, it is a 2 step process. First is to convert ALL the drives to RAW format, then convert them to qcow2 image.

  If you only have one drive for the VM, it is fairly easy. Here is one of many links from google:

  https://kuther.net/content/convert-virtualbox-kvmqemu

  Lots of other links available as well.

  The qemu-img in CentOS 7 can do this in one step instead of 2 though …

  qemu-img convert -f vdi -O qcow2 vm.vdi vm.qcow2

  (You would substitute your actual vdi file name for vm.vdi and name the output file whatever you want instead of vm.qcow2).

  Once you have a qcow2 file, you just import it in virt-manager and it should work.

  –17vw3U7nfkmumR6RSdixDR4BcmRAnVC6r

• An alternative might be this one. I’ve always found this person’s KVM docs very easy to follow.

  http://linux.dell.com/files/whitepapers/KVM_Virtualization_in_RHEL_7_Made_Easy.pdf

• I don’t understand the issue… I’ve installed CentOS-7 on Virtualbox without hassle. it just runs.

  what problem are you trying to solve?

• In article <20160517130235.GA6498@fcshome.stoneham.ma.us>, Fred Smith wrote:

  That sounds like you mean C7 as a guest. I’ve done that easily too.

  It sounds like he is talking about C7 as a host. I haven’t tried that.

  Cheers Tony

• http://karim-ouda.blogspot.com/2011/07/errors-solutions-19.html

  This seems to be a common problem with VirtualBox, and doesn’t appear to be systemd related.

  (Like others, I’d encourage you to move toward KVM.)

• I’m running CentOS7 as my host and when I was using Virtualbox, I had my VM’s autostarting for a while. I simply followed this answer [0] on
  “askubuntu.com” and it worked flawlessly. However, I’ve since migrated all my VM’s to KVM once performance on KVM surpassed that of Virtualbox
  (most of my VM’s are Linux servers).

  My $0.02, ak.

  [0]
  https://askubuntu.com/questions/404665/how-to-start-virtual-box-machines-automatically-when-booting/548134

• thanks for the pointer which of the 9 answers did you use – there are four with [0] points. I
  did see this some time ago and got a variant working under CentOS 6. I
  was hoping to use the new-fangled systemd, partly as a learning exercise, but also to avoid having bespoke config files and methods of starting daemons proliferating which the methods described on askubuntu.com seem to be. rob

• Apologies – I should have stated that in my initial response.

  It’s the answer that starts of with – “You can use the VirtualBox Auto-start service.” – it has an up-vote score of 20 (as of now).

  That article cites the following link *[0]* as the original source:

  *[0]*
  http://lifeofageekadmin.com/how-to-set-your-virtualbox-vm-to-automatically-startup/

  ak.

• thanks, the other link helped but there are still errors in all the various instructions one error not noted was the /etc/defaults/virtualbox file it – cannot have spaces!
  it should be

  # virtualbox defaults file VBOXAUTOSTART_DB=/etc/vbox VBOXAUTOSTART_CONFIG=/etc/vbox/autostart.cfg

  My server has a very well exercised reboot as I have finally got it done Thanks for all the pointers, finally have something that seems to be reliable.