This weekend I had some time to spend with VirtualBox. VirtualBox is a cross-platform virtualization application. This helps you to run various operating system as virtual machine. This is the concept that is adapted by most of the companies which offer us cloud computing. Recently I came to know that VirtualBox has built in Web service with which we can control the virtual instances remotely. My immediate reaction was to search for some open source solution which uses web service of VirtualBox. phpVirtualBox came to rescue. It has full fledged features which can be use used to control VirtualBox installed in a server.
phpVirtualBox – An open source, AJAX implementation of the VirtualBox user interface written in PHP. As a modern web interface, it allows you to access and control remote VirtualBox instances. Much of its verbage and some of its code is based on the (inactive) vboxweb project. phpVirtualBox was created for people (like me) who prefer not to have to log in to their headless VirtualBox host to administer their virtual machines.
To make it work in Mac I had to install the latest beta version of phpVirtualBox (4.1-1b) for VirtualBox (4.1.2). The current stable version had some issues with authentication. However, phpVirtualBox has wiki which helps to install and configure the web application. If you encounter any issues please refer to common errors in phpVirtualBox wiki.
Happy journey with virtualization 🙂
