Autostart a Virtualbox VM in Windows 7 the Easy Way

I’ve seen a few tutorials out there about setting up a headless Virtualbox service in windows in order to autostart a VM and wasted a few hours of my life following pages of instructions ending in giving up. I recently reinstalled windows 7 on my home HTPC/Server and wanted a linux VM to autostart whenever Windows decided to run updates and auto restart. I swore I wouldn’t attempt the awful services method again and would insead follow the principle of keep it simple stupid.

My only caveat in setting up this autostarting headless VM was that Windows 7 remain password protected when it started up (task scheduler’s on start trigger function didn’t prove much help with this goal BTW)…a little less simple but I managed to keep it under 3 steps somehow, mostly thanks to superuser’s superb knowledge base and some luck googling. Keep in mind I have a single user setup on this windows 7 machine. Multiple users might require you force the machine to always logon to your VirtualBox/Startup script user by default after a reboot…so you’ve been warned. Here’s how it’s done:

1. download hstart (see README)
2. Remove/un-check the “User must enter a username and password to use this computer” checkbox option from Start -> Run -> `control userpasswords2` (But wait…didn’t you just say…YES KEEP READING)
3. write a batch script in your startup folder containing (psudocode): C:/hstart.exe /NOCONSOLE “VMBoxHeadless.exe -start-vm ‘your-vm-name’” followed by “rundll32.exe user32.dll,LockWorkStation”

The name VMBoxHeadless is a bit misleading since you still have a cmd window to leave open as long as you want your VM running if you run it through a batch script, that’s where hstart comes in. Then you have to tell windows to logon automatically instead of waiting for the user to enter a username/password. Finally your batch script run VMBoxHeadless through hstart and then just re-locks your computer afterwards and you have a primed and ready VM waiting for you upon restart. If your VM name has spaces it might require escaped quotes or single quotes around it, I used a hyphen in my name so I didn’t have to deal with that problem.

Here’s an eaxmple batch script

C:\Users\HTPC\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup\hstart a-serv headless.bat:

"E:\scripts\hstart64.exe" /NOCONSOLE "C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\VBoxHeadless.exe -startvm a-serv" 
rundll32.exe user32.dll,LockWorkStation

References (yay superuser!)
What is the best way to hide a command prompt window?
Command line cmd command to lock a windows machine

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