The Core Technologies Blog

Professional Software for Windows Services / 24×7 Operation


Why does my VirtualBox VM say “Powered Off” when it’s running as a Service with AlwaysUp?

VirtualBox Problem

We’re big fans of Oracle’s VirtualBox software. It’s powerful and free, and it enables our small company to efficiently test and validate our software on various versions of Windows without having to invest in costly, dedicated hardware.

However, we noticed a strange problem with VirtualBox last week. After following our tutorial to setup a VirtualBox Virtual Machine (VM) as a Windows Service with AlwaysUp, we noticed that even though the machine was working normally, the VirtualBox Manager application incorrectly listed the VM as “Powered Off”. But it had been on for more than 10 days!

VirtualBox says Powered Off

And it wasn’t just the VirtualBox Manager. Even the powerful VBoxManage command line utility thought that our VM wasn’t running:

VBoxManage list runningvms - No VMs running

However, when we ran a command prompt in Session 0, VBoxManage saw the VM there:

VBoxManage list runningvms in Session 0

So it seems that the VirtualBox tools can only see virtual machines running in the same session that they are in.

Therefore, we simply can’t rely on the state shown in the VirtualBox Manager application when running our VM in the background (in Session 0) with AlwaysUp.

Bummer. 🙁

Posted in AlwaysUp | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

One Response to Why does my VirtualBox VM say “Powered Off” when it’s running as a Service with AlwaysUp?

  1. Wagner says:

    Thank you very much for help!!!
    It solved my problem.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *