Sometimes when you have several virtual machines in your Sun VirtualBox, it’s better to create a shortcut for each virtual machine in desktop. In fact each virtual machine in VirtualBox can be opened without opening main VirtualBox GUI. Here we can see how to create shortcut for VirtualBox virtual machine on your desktop, so virtual machine can be started easily without opening main VirtualBox console.
1) Make sure virtual machine names are exist without space in VirtualBox.
2) To get the correct name of virtual machines available on your computer, go to installation location on sun VirtualBox in host computer.
Type: VBoxManage list vms
3) Now create a normal windows shortcut for VBoxManage.exe in Program Files directory. (Right click on Desktop, New shortcut and browse for VBoxManage.exe file), give a name for shortcut.
4) Right click on shortcut you created and go to shortcut tab. After the VBoxManage.exe, type startvm <Virtual machine name>. Below example shows I’m trying to create shortcut for Windows7 virtual machine.
That’s it. Since we are calling Command prompt program thought this shortcut. You can change the icon of sun VirtualBox virtual machine shortcut created.
Follow the same steps to create shortcut for each virtual machines in sun VirtualBox.
Download Sun Virtual Box and Create Shortcut For Virtual Machine in VirtualBox
Tommy says
You can use virtual machine names with spaces as well, as long as you wrap the names in quotes so “drive:\path\VBoxManage.exe” startvm “name with spaces”
reed1 says
Very handy. Thanks : )
KiltBear says
On Mac Snow Leopard I am find that the following works:
At the system prompt:
/Applications/VirtualBox.app/Contents/MacOS/VBoxManage startvm VirtualMachineName
so you can make an apple script or shell script that executes this command.
I created a simple Applescript that contains simply:
do shell script “/Applications/VirtualBox.app/Contents/MacOS/VBoxManage startvm XP”