Install phpVirtualBox on Windows & Linux

What is phpVirtualBox: How to Install phpVirtualBox on Windows & Linux

This article introduces phpVirtualBox, an open source, AJAX and PHP-based implementation of the Oracle VirtualBox interface.

oracle VirtualBox is a great enterprise ready virtualisation software. However, what it lacks is a powerful Web-based management interface. Usually, people prefer VMWare over VirtualBox, as it has good Web-based remote management interface.

phpVirtualBox provides an interface that"s a VirtualBox-look-alike for people who are not command-line savvy. Through phpVirtualBox, you can control a headless VirtualBox VM from a Web browser, including operations such as start/stop VMs, take snapshots, configure VMs, import/export VMs, and much more.

The requirements are:

• Any Web server with PHP 5.2.0 or later; xampp will be good.
• A working installation of Oracle VirtualBox 3.2.2 or later.
• Any Web browser--- Firefox, Opera, Chrome or IE---will do the job.

Installation on Windows

Installation is very simple. Here , I"m using Windows XP SP3.

Install Oracle VirtualBox OSE 3.2.10, and then install xampplite-win32-1.7.3. Download phpVirtualBox 0.5 from here and extract the files/folder into htdocs directory. phpVirtualBox requires that vboxwebsrv.exe must be running on the Oracle VirtualBox host machine. This file is located at C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\.

Now, edit the config.php file and change it to the following settings:

Now navigate to the resulting folder in your Web browser. ( see the figure below)

Installation on Linux

The installation on Linux is also very simple. I am using Ubuntu 9.10 for this work, and installed xampp-linux-1.7.3. It comes with the latest PHP version. To install Oracle VirtualBox 3.2 on Ubuntu, first you have to add the repos for VirtualBox in your /etc/apt/sources.list:

After that, update your repository cache with the following command :

To install Oracle VirtualBox, run the code given below:

phpVirtualBox requires you to start the vboxwebsrv program, located under /usr/bin:

Here are the parameters :

• -b : run the program in the background
• -logfile : log file location for vboxwebserv

Now download phpVirtualBox 0.5:

Unpack it to /var/www or /usr/local/apache2/htdocs. In config.php, edit the following parameters:

Now navigate to the resulting folder in your Web browser.

NOTE: for the sake of tutorial, i have used a single physical machine for Oracle VirtualBox and phpVirtualBox. If you don,t want burden at your Oracle VirtualBox installation with a Web server, then you can host phpVirtualBox on another machine. In that case, you have to make some simple modifications.
Till then enjoy the post and keep visiting !!!