Finally got my VM’s running headless and have been able to connect from my laptop. To start the VM, issue this command:
VBoxHeadless -startvm “CentOS01”
Then from another PC, start rdesktop (RDP client) and connect to the host ip address. This will open the console session to the VM. The port can be changed by adding -p to the end of the VBoxHeadless command, default port is 3389 so don’t forget to allow connections to that port in iptables. The only problem with this is that the VM is “aborted” if I close the terminal window where I started the VM from. To get around this I can either use nohup, or screen to start it in the background. These options would look like this:
nohup VBoxHeadless -startvm “CentOS01” &
screen VBoxHeadless -startvm “CentOS01” &