Headless VirtualBox Part Three: Bring on the Clones!

Today I wanted to work on a logstash grok statement and kibana dashboard for nmap output and, eventually, Qualys scans. The idea was that I wanted to have a dashboard that let me see any new hosts discovered on the network in the last twenty-four hours, new services that showed up on existing systems and new services on the network period.

That's great, I just need several VMs to scan and show up on the network. Since I recently made the FBSDTemplate VM, I can just clone it out. I did that on my headless Ubuntu system...but that's okay, because as it turns out, VirtualBox lets you clone VMs on the command line!

And, to no Unix or Linux user's surprise, it's faster than cloning via the GUI.

list

In the GUI you get a pretty pane that has a list of all your VMs. To see those at the command line is a simple command:

VBoxManage list vms

When you list your VMs, you get both the "name" of the VM and the ID of the VM. You can use either of these when using the VBoxManage command -- I like using the name because I don't have to copy/paste it.

Notice I have two VMs:

You can also show only your running VMs with:

VBoxManage list runningvms

clonevm

In the GUI you'd need to select the VM you want to clone, use the hot-key or right-click and choose "Clone", then follow dialogues about whether you want to do a full or linked clone, whether you want to change the MAC address for network cards, etc.

Cloning at the command line, though, is a single command!

If I want to clone FBSDTemplate to a new DHCP and DNS server called FBSDNetworkServices, I can do that in one step. By default it will change the MAC address *and* create a full clone! When I created my clone I used the "--register" option so VirtualBox would be immediately aware of it.

VBoxManage clonevm FBSDTemplate --name FBSDNetworkServices --register

That's it, job done! All that's left is to start it.

Here is everything I did, start to finish:

The entire process, start to finish, took about thirty seconds *and I could do it over SSH*. I realise I'm coming late to the party, that tons of people have been using VBoxManage to do SSH-based management of headless VirtualBox servers for years. As with everything that's "old hat", there are always people being introduced.

That's where I am with VBoxManage and, on the whole, I'm chuffed to bits!