RemoteBox

RemoteBox is an open source and cross-platform piece of software that has been designed from the ground up to act as a client for the Oracle VirtualBox virtualization software, allowing users to remotely control guest virtual machines that run on the same machine or on a remote server.

Features at a glance

Key features include the remote management of the Oracle VirtualBox application and its virtual machines, ability to edit and create guest machines, support for VM snapshots, support for multiple host operating systems, ability to start, save and pause virtual machine states, support for attaching USB devices and create USB filters.

In addition, it is possible to set the BIOS configuration of a guest, as well as to set advanced options like CPU throttling and hotplugging, large pages, page fusion, HPET, and many others. Furthermore, the applications lets you to configure network interfaces, view and interact with the guest's display using RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol), attach storage devices, and configure the VM's components.

Under the hood, availability and supported OSes

It looks like the program is written entirely in the Perl programming language and uses a GTK+ powered graphical user interface, meaning that there's no need for a web server or compilation to install and run RemoteBox on your system. It is available for download as source and binary archives for various Linux distributions.

Being written in Perl it is a cross-platform application that runs well on GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating system. It's compatible with Oracle VirtualBox instances that run on Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X or Microsoft Windows systems.

Bottom line

Summing up, RemoteBox is a stable, lightweight and feature-full software that allows anyone to remotely administer running virtual machines of the world's most popular free virtualization software, VirtualBox.

What is new in this release:

• RemoteBox now requires VirtualBox 5.0.x.
• Added guest support for USB 3.0.
• Added OS icons for Windows 10, OS/2 1.x, Yosemite, El Capitan
• Added command line options for automatic login. See manual.
• Added option to set the virtual VGA card of a guest to either VirtualBox VGA
• or VMware SVGA-II
• Allow snapshots to be taken while the guest is paused
• Added support for adding USB storage controller to a guest
• Added support for adding transient shared folders
• Added support for setting IPv6 Port Forwarding rules on NAT networks
• Added option to convert disk images to VDI when importing an appliance
• Changed the way guest details are displayed and added an option to show
• extended (slower) or reduced (faster) guest details
• Added support for selecting built-in presets for the RDP clients. These are
• currently FreeRDP (New Syntax), FreeRDP (Old Syntax), Rdesktop, Windows
• Remote Desktop Client
• Added support for selecting the paravirtualization interface for a guest
• Added keyboard toolbutton for quick access to common keyboard sequences. The
• full keyboard menu is still available
• Fixed a problem with trailing slashes in a URL preventing the remote display
• to a guest from opening.
• Fixed a problem with UTF8 strings affecting the listing of storage attached
• to controllers
• Fixed an issue where 'Stuck' guests couldn't be stopped from the GUI.
• Various GUI tweaks

What is new in version 1.9:

• Combined guest logs onto a single tabbed window
• Added fix to show documentation when running on Windows
• Added Memory Bar to show memory usage on the server
• Added support for importing OVF/OVA appliances
• Added support for exporting a VM as an OVF/OVA appliance
• Added support for setting IPv4 Port Forwarding rules on NAT networks
• Improvements made to error handling on most dialogs
• Various GUI tweaks

What is new in version 1.8.1:

• Minor release to fix SOAP versioning issues experienced by some users
• Bundle appdata.xml file for packagers with distros that use it

What is new in version 1.8:

• Added option to automatically start chosen guests when the host system boots.
• This requires some server side configuration before it can be used. Consult the RemoteBox manual for more information.
• Added option to set the start delay on an autostarting guest so that guests can be started up in a specific sequence if required.
• Added option to set the shutdown type on a guest when the host is shutdown
• Added VirtualBox preference to set the location of the autostart database
• Snapshot Tree: Moved 'current state' underneath the most recent snapshot in the tree
• Added state icons to the snapshot list, which indicate if a snapshot is an online or offline snapshot
• Optimized list handling in several places which should improve performance and remember selections on list refreshes where practical.
• Added additional information when a storage medium is selected in the VMM
• Added additional guest keyboard shortcuts, Ctrl-Alt-(F4, F5, F6, F8, F9, F10, F11)
• Added ability to add, remove and edit NAT Networks via the VirtualBox preferences menu item. Port forwarding rules must be configured elsewhere for the moment.
• Added option to set the network attachment type in the guest settings to
• 'NAT Network'. These are named NAT networks which are subtly different to just 'NAT'.
• Added option to set the snapshot folder location for a guest
• Added OS icons for various editions of MacOS X.
• Added support for guest groups. Groups are shown in a tree-fashion which is somewhat visually different to VirtualBox. Setting guest groups is fairly rudimentary at the moment requiring you to enter the group in the form of '/group/subgroup'.
• Added 'Expand All Groups' and 'Collapse All Groups' buttons. The last used button is remembered for subsequent refreshes of the guest list
• Fixed some Windows guest icons.
• Fixed a bug when creating Host-Only networks. An associated virtual DHCP server wasn't getting created which would cause invalid object references and ultimately made the Host-Only network feature useless.
• Fixed a bug when entering folders in the remote file chooser that denied permission but the location was still updated. Now also warns that you don't have permission to enter that folder
• Fixed a bug where a medium would be masked out in lists if another medium with the same name existed.
• Fixed a bug where the Video Memory could get erroneously pegged to 1MB on the first opening on the settings dialog.
• Inaccessible guests are now filtered from the list of guests and a warning issued in the message log. RemoteBox has never handled inaccessible guests well and for the most part the cause is generally the user manipulating guests without VirtualBox's knowledge.
• Various GUI tweaks

What is new in version 1.7:

• Added Video Capture support for the guest's display
• FreeRDP (aka xfreerdp) is now the default and recommended RDP client. If you used rdesktop previously, your preferences will follow however you can update
• your preferences if you desire. Go to File->RemoteBox Preferences and under RDP client, change it to: xfreerdp -g %Xx%Y --plugin cliprdr --plugin rdpsnd -T "%n RemoteBox" %h:%p NOTE: You may need to install the freerdp package for your operating system.
• Added additional substitutions for use with the RDP Client preference. These are:
• %X The Auto-Hint Resolution width
• %Y The Auto-Hint Resolution height
• %D The Auto-Hint Resolution depth
• These can be used for specifying desired resolutions with your RDP client.
• Fixed a bug where cached information (which was potentially invalid) was not flushed completely across a new connection to a server
• Fixed a guest cloning bug where the machine reference was being used before the guest was fully cloned, causing GUI deadlock until the clone had completed
• Fixed adding a host only network interfaces where the new interface would not immediately show up. Primarily only affected windows hosts
• Fixed a bug preventing logging in when using Perl 5.18 (Fedora 20, OpenSUSE 13.1, NetBSD 6, FreeBSD etc)
• Improved remote file path handling across disparate operating systems (again)
• Improved remote file dialogs
• Improved progress dialogs. They show time remaining where available and can be cancelled where VirtualBox allows.
• Spin boxes now accept case insensitive unit qualifiers where applicable: (eg MB, GB, TB) for specifying memory and disk sizes (eg ms, secs, mins) for specifying time
• Worked around a bug where VirtualBox strips the leading path of a location on a reload when a double / is found in the path. This could cause disks to be inaccessible (due to incorrect path) when VirtualBox is reloaded.
• Various GUI tweaks

What is new in version 1.5:

• Most of the guest's settings can now be changed while the guest is running, which should reduce the inconvenience of shutting the guest as previously required.
• Added ability to save screenshots of guests as PNG images.
• Added icon for Solaris 11 (64bit) guest OS
• Added icon for Windows 2012 (64bit) guest OS
• Added status icons for each guest in the list
• Added icons to the storage page when editing guest settings
• Now uses additional 'recommendedChipset', 'recommendedAudioController', 'recommendedFloppy' and 'recommendedUSB' defaults when creating a new guest
• Fixed the System->Advanced->Time Offset widget when editing guest settings. The time offset could not be adjusted.
• Fixed the Display->Remote Display->Video Stream Quality widget when editing guest settings. The stream quality could not be adjusted.
• Fixed the memory setting, it no longer artificially limits a guest to 16GB of RAM
• Various minor GUI tweaks
• Added SSL certificate verification option

What is new in version 1.4:

• This version primarily brings VirtualBox 4.2.x support and drops support for the VirtualBox 4.1.x branch.
• Added the ability to hot-plug and hot-unplug CPUs from the guest whilst it is running. This requires setting the CPU hotplug option in the guest settings. You are advised to read the RemoteBox manual regarding this feature because support varies depending on the OS used in the guest.
• Added support for creating QED QEMU hard disk images
• Added support for creating QCOW QEMU hard disk images
• Added the ability to attach physical CD/DVD drives to a guest
• Added the ability to attach physical floppy drives to a guest
• Improved guest session handlers and guest locking
• Deleting a guest now deletes the associated screenshot icon (if any)
• Increased the number of configurable network cards for a guest to 8 cards. The selected card is now chosen by a combobox rather than a tab.
• Added additional keyboard entries which send keyboard sequences of the form 'Alt-SysRq+x', for example Alt-SysRq+F1. These were often used under very old UNIX flavours such as Dell UNIX, AT&T UNIX, ISC UNIX etc to switch between virtual terminals.
• Added button to generate a new MAC address for a virtual network card when editing a guest's settings
• Fixed a minor bug where file permissions were being shown as decimal numbers in the remote file chooser, rather than the conventional octal.

What is new in version 1.2:

• Rebased from GTK 2.16 to GTK 2.22 as the minimum version. If your OS / Distro is not new enough, you may wish to remain at v1.1.
• Added support for creating Full, State and Linked clones of guests
• When creating a parallels hard disk the image is now created with the .hdd extension rather than .parallels
• The state of the option on the connect dialog to save URLs and Usernames is now remembered between RemoteBox sessions
• Added option to attach an empty CD/DVD drive when editing a guest's settings
• Added option to attach an empty Floppy drive when editing a guest's settings
• Added option to manually set the port count for SATA controllers
• Added option to mark a hard disk image as a Solid State disk
• Added an option to mark a CD/DVD image as a Live CD/DVD.
• Added ability to manually set the port on a controller that a medium is attached to
• Added a refresh button to the Virtual Media Manager to refresh the list of current media
• Added support for changing a disk images type to Normal, Writethrough, Immutable and Multi-Attach
• Added a facility in the VMM to provide for the duplication and copying of hard disks. This also allows you to convert a disk from one format to another
• Timestamps are now prefixed to entries in the message log
• Hopefully finally fixed the bug where the change CD and Floppy menus were available when they should not be, even though this was supposed to be fixed in v1.1
• More fixes to the DVD & Floppy items in the Machine menu. On occassions it would still permit you to change disks on an unselected guest.
• Minor bug fix when reporting errors from VirtualBox or SOAP which contained characters. This would end up being treated as GTK markup
• Fixed the maximum BIOS time waiting to 65535. Higher values are invalid and the guest will not start until its changed.
• The usual plethora of GUI tweaks
• Significant code optimisation with rebasing to GTK 2.22

What is new in version 1.1:

• Cosmetic changes to the New Virtual Machine and Create New HD dialogs
• Cosmetic changes to the network part of the Edit Settings dialog
• Added support for creating a new guest without a hard disk
• Added support for creating VMDK disk images (Dynamic, Fixed and 2GiB Split types)
• Added support for creating VHD disk images (Dynamic and Fixed types)
• Added support for creating Parallels disk images (Dynamic)
• Added additional run-time information such as the version of guest additions installed when showing 'more details' for a guest
• Added supported for setting the promiscuous mode policy on guest network adapters
• Added support for setting a generic network driver and generic properties
• Improved the handling of ports on storage controllers, for example SATA controllers are not created with all ports enabled by default
• Improved the internal network name widget. A drop down list of internal networks is now presented rather than having to manually type it
• Now displays a warning if the server does not have the Oracle VM VirtualBox Extension Pack installed or if the extension pack is outdated.
• Fixed a minor bug when showing 'more details' for a guest. The network details were not shown.
• Fixed minor bug where the Remove and Release buttons on the VMM dialog were sometimes enabled when they shouldn't have been.
• Fixed a bug where the change CD and Floppy menus were available, even when a guest was powered off
• Attaching storage to a guest now explicitly saves the guest settings, even if you subsequently press cancel in order to work around what seems to be a VirtualBox bug. Previously, attaching a disk but cancelling the settings lead to a dichotomy where the disk image believed it was attached to the guest but the guest disagreed. This would cause side-effects such as being unable to release the medium or VirtualBox complaining that a disk referenced a guest which does not exist.

What is new in version 1.0:

• This version concentrated on bringing compatibility with VirtualBox 4.1.X. New VirtualBox 4.1 features will be added in subsequent releases.
• Fixed a particularly horrible bug which was probably introduced in 0.8 or 0.9 caused by the unintentional emmission of GTK signals when opening the edit window for the first time on a new connection. Any guest settings which used a slider (eg memory) but get set to the base value and be saved if the user chose save.
• Fixed a bug where attempting to delete a snapshot with more than one child would cause an unmanged object reference.
• Further improvements to the remote file chooser dialog. File paths are now better "sanitised".

Requirements:

• gtk+
• Perl
• SOAP::Lite