Sun posted a note on the front page of the VirtualBox website noting a new project in development sure to make administrating virtual machines much simpler. The project is called VirtualBox Web Console and aims to replicate the VirtualBox console in Web 2.0 fashion. In their own words,

The mission of the VirtualBox Web Console project is very simple: implement the VirtualBox user interface using modern Web 2.0 techniques like AJAX. It will start with very little functionality but our intention is to grow this quickly into a very powerful and easy to use web interface for either a single VirtualBox host or a group of hosts.

The code is certainly its infancy and it seems that those responsible for its development plan on taking advantage of community contributions — as evidenced by being hosted on Google Code. The team has a few blog posts outs, but it’s really too early to tell how responsive they’ll be to the community at large.

Basics

The project exposes itself as a website running on Python and looks largely like the native console, with a listing of VMs on the left and details on the right. The obligatory Start, Pause, and Power buttons are available, as are the settings summary and description. While it looks like a great start, there’s a lot of planned functionality that isn’t completed. Clicking the Settings button reports the message, “Change VM settings not implemented!” There’s even filler menus with filler text.

As expected with such an early release, the web application is broken all-around. Creating a new VM generates a wizard to guide you through the process, but many portions are unlabeled and confusing. This isn’t a knock against the team – any project where I have to checkout from source repository with live changes spells disaster. Simply be forewarned if you are interested in testing the project on your own.

Because of the state of the project, initial setup is more involved in a standard project. Fortunately, the team documented an instruction wiki page that overviews the major requirements. It’s slanted towards Windows, but any seasoned Linux or OS X user should be able to adapt as required.

Moving beyond settings

Aside from standard virtual machine maintenance, the golden nugget of this project appears to be the Console functionality implemented using a component creatively named, “Sun RDP Web Control”. In actuality, this is intended to be an embedded Adobe Flash application which will act as a liaison between the user and the RDP session.

I say intended because I couldn’t get the functionality to work when I post-forwarded the embedded web server. When accessing the website on the same network, it worked flawlessly – every action I performed in the Flash component appeared instantly in the actual virtual machine. After a bit of discussion on the Architecture blog post, it seems that the RDP Web Control mostly acts as a browser-embedded RDC client. That is, it connects to the RDP port of the target machine. If it doesn’t happen to be on your network, you’ll never connect. I hoped the component was a bit more complicated than that, but alas not. A workaround, I suggested was the possibility of overriding the IP and port. This would allow a user to port-forward the RDP locally and force the connection to that local port. While I would appreciate a true interface to pass-through actions, this would be an acceptable compromise.

Furthermore, while the idea is lofty, I think relying on RDP is ultimately a mistake, as this features is only available in the closed-source edition. Those intending to use OSE will be out-of-luck.

Wrap-up

The project holds much promise. If they deliver even a basic utility implementing the most common management features, plus the interactive console, VirtualBox will have a real winner on their hands. As with expanded disk file support and 3D acceleration, Sun has continued making solid jabs at other virtualization vendors. If the feature pace is kept up and the community stays involved, other virtualization products might find themselves leapfrogged in popularity.