Autostart and auto save of your vms during start up and shutdown of your host machine without doing your favorite sudo or even su just to have your vms autostart and auto save. Enable the service one time and the vms you can set to auto via VBoxManage.

This works with systemd only.

At creation time of the vms the extradata with the key pvbx/startupMode has no value.(Which is ignored) One need's to add the "auto" flag to the virtual machine in order for it auto boot and auto save during startup and shutdown or reboot of the host. The virtual machine are then run in the background. (which is what a daemon is all about :-)). One can access the virtual machines by using ssh(1) or with the gui tools such as Krdc for KDE and the equivalent for other DE's. Example of commands are:

LIST VMS.

VBoxManage list vms

SET THE "AUTO" FLAG TO THE VMS.

VBoxManage setextradata vm-name pvbx/startupMode auto

SET THE "MANUAL" FLAG TO THE VMS.

VBoxManage setextradata vm-name pvbx/startupMode manual

Where "vm-name" is the name of the virtual machine.

It is not recommended to run the script with root's right such as running it with the all time favorite sudo utility. Once one have set the "auto" flag to the virtual machines one can test the script. Invoke it as a normal user that belongs to the vboxusers group. (It should be in once PATH so absolute path is not necessary.)

systemd-vboxinit --start

systemd-vboxinit --stop

One should see the virtual machines starting and saving state. If that succeeded one can enable the daemon and reboot.

• Start the service.

systemctl start VBoxAutostart@foo

• Enable the service.

systemctl enable VBoxAutostart@foo

• Check the status of the service

systemctl status VBoxAutostart@foo

journalctl _SYSTEMD_UNIT=VBoxAutostart@foo.service

• Restart the service.

systemctl restart VBoxAutostart@foo

Where foo is the username of the user who will use systemd-vboxinit.