Virtualbox Headless Mode

[jimbo8098]

While working on #43 , I opened up VRDE so that I could see the box as it comes up. The change effectively resulted in adding

    <VRDEProperties>
      <Property name="TCP/Address" value="{{ virtualbox.vrde_host }}"/>
      <Property name="TCP/Ports" value="{{ virtualbox.vrde_port }}"/>
    </VRDEProperties>

The node was added between the </StorageControllers> and </Machine> elements within the roles/setup/VirtualBox.vbox.tmpl file.

I then added inventory parameters for the above two variables, in my case vrde_host was 0.0.0.0 and vrde_port was 3389 (although my extensions actually meant that it was using VNC 😂 ).

If it's something you think would be beneficial, I'll raise a PR for it.

[jborean93]

What's the benefit of this mechanism compared to just the headless and non-headless mode in VirtualBox? I'm just trying to understand the purpose of such a change and why someone would want to use this.

[jimbo8098]

In my use case, I was running on a system without a GUI. The changes were cumbersome to make manually on an as and when basis. I believe it could have it's uses when it comes to troubleshooting an issue prior to the rest of the Ansible being able to run.