How to Start a Virtual Machine at Startup Using VirtualBox

This did not seem obvious to me, so I hope it is valuable to someone else. If you are using VirtualBox to host your newly created Virtual Servers, one of the questions you will find yourself asking is: “What if my machine reboots?” VirtualBox does not (yet) have a built in way to indicate that you want to start a VM when your Host machine boots, so you need to add this to your startup.

If you are on Windows, create a batch file with the following content:


@echo off
cls
"C:\Program Files\Sun\VirtualBox\VBoxManage.exe" startvm vm-name
@exit


You should replace “vm-name” with the name of the Virtual Machine you want to start. If you are on XP, make sure you are using TweakUI to auto-login to XP.

Enjoy!