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VirtualBox cheatsheet

The CLI tool to do all Virtualbox operations: VBoxManage

Tip

Add your Virtualbox location to your environment PATH

List VMs

VBoxManage list vms

Running VMs : 

vboxmanage list runningvms

Info

Includes hidden VMs created by Vagrant

Start VM

In headless mode 

VBoxManage startvm worker1 --type headless

Stop VM

Clean way to stop machines: 

vboxmanage controlvm worker1 poweroff soft

Snapshot VM

VBoxManage snapshot worker1 take snap-worker1-initial --description="initial state"

List snapshot

VBoxManage snapshot worker1 list

Restore a snapshot

VBoxManage snapshot { uuid|vmname } restore { snapshot-name }

Delete VM

VBoxManage unregistervm VMNAME --delete

List forwarded VM ports

VBoxManage showvminfo VMNAME --machinereadable | Select-String -Pattern 'Forwarding'

Note

Select-String is a PowerShell command

VirtualBox Help

Simply type VBoxManage - You will see how rich is this CLI command You can do all that is possible with the GUI and more ...