VBoxVMStatus
by Peter Upfold.
This program is a simple way to see, graphically, the status of your VBoxVmService-started VirtualBox virtual machines. It is written in Visual Basic.NET (.NET Fx 4.0.x) and was created in Visual Studio 2010.
VBoxVmService is a useful little piece of code that allows you to run VirtualBox virtual machines as a service on a Windows host. This means that you can have those virtual machines start upon boot, without having to have a user interactively log in to the Windows host. I have been using this myself on a Windows VM host to start two virtual machines. Unfortunately, this approach has a limitation. You cannot use the regular VirtualBox UI to manage the VBoxVmService-started VMs. Instead, you must enable the excellent VRDP support in VirtualBox to log in to the virtual machines. This, however, leaves a gap — you can't see the status of the virtual machines in the VirtualBox GUI, you can't start and stop the machines at will with a GUI, and the only way to check the status is using the VmServiceControl.exe application.
This program is designed, for this specific machine, to solve that problem — to provide a GUI to check the status of these VMs, as well as start and stop them on demand.
The user interface is, at the moment, customised and very specific for this machine that I am using. There are two VMs that I want to run on that machine. The names of these VMs that I have are hard-coded into the app for now.
I provide the code here for this solution so that if others want to adapt this program for their environment, they can. Who knows, in time, this project might be more useful for any kind of VBoxVmService deployment. ;)