For some reasons, my computer just only installed Ubuntu Server 14.04 system. But sometimes I need to use Windows system to test our project, so I think if I can install virtualbox on the Ubuntu Server, and then manage the virtualbox by website.

How to do that?

Install Virtualbox

First we go to the website, and download the latest verion(5.0.2) of Virtualbox:

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wget http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/5.0.2/virtualbox-5.0_5.0.2-102096~Ubuntu~trusty_amd64.deb
wget http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/5.0.2/Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-5.0.2-102096.vbox-extpack

Install:

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sudo dpkg -i virtualbox-5.0_5.0.2-102096\~Ubuntu\~trusty_amd64.deb
sudo apt-get install -f # install dependency
sudo VBoxManage extpack install Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-5.0.2-102096.vbox-extpack

Add vbox user

Because we want to use the web service that Virtualbox provide, we need to create a new user and set the password of the user:

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sudo useradd -m -G vboxusers vbox
sudo passwd vbox

Install web server

Install apache, PHP and Other components:

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sudo apt-get install apache2 php5 libapache2-mod-php5 php-soap

Install phpvirtualbox

Phpvirtualbox is an open source project that is a web-based front-end to VirtualBox written in PHP. We use it to manage our Virtualbox, download the latest verion(5.0.2):

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wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/phpvirtualbox/phpvirtualbox-5.0-2.zip -O phpvirtualbox.zip

Unzip the package and move to the root dir:

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unzip phpvirtualbox.zip
sudo mv phpvirtualbox-5.0-2 /var/www/html/vbox

Setup the config file, make $username and $password match the user we created earlier:

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sudo mv /var/www/html/vbox/config.php-example /var/www/html/vbox/config.php
sudo vi /var/www/html/vbox/config.php

Config Virtualbox webservice

Add VBOXWEB_USER=vbox to file:

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sudo vi /etc/default/virtualbox

Start the service:

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sudo /etc/init.d/vboxweb-service start

Done

Now we can open bowser and go to http://server/vbox and login with username admin and password admin (you can change it when login into phpvirtualbox).

We can see the view is so familiar, that’s it.