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Automated Snapshots with VirtualBox

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ewemoa:
Thanks for the link -- I'd just come across:

  http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch11.html

where I saw COM, XPCOM, and other things of potential interest mentioned.  This triggered some poking around the VirtualBox site's documentation section, where I noticed the SDK Programming Guide, but haven't really looked at it in any detail yet.

I'm not sure how nasty taking a snapshot becomes, so some real-world experience via a prototype using easy-to-develop scripts and some scheduling code as you suggested is a path that seems reasonable.  FWIW, it looks like the tool on the guest end, vboxcontrol, is headed in the direction of being able to initiate a snapshot.  In my locally installed version, I get some message about not implemented yet, so ATM it's looking like a host+guest idea.

On a related note, I started to use Workrave recently and got to thinking that if I was going to be taking breaks so frequently, may be snapshotting could happen during some of those times :)

This idea seems pretty obvious in retrospect though, so I'm wondering if someone hasn't already done something similar.

Ath:
The scripts should be fairly easy, I guess, haven't any VM's available in VBox to test ATM, but if needed I could create one (on Windows).

I've been using Workrave for some time a couple of years back (I stopped using any of those softwares, to annoying), but can't recall if it does support running some kind of user actions on a break/pause. You could ask on the Bugzilla e-mail group if you can't find this feature, they seem rather responsive.

ewemoa:
Thanks for the ideas and suggestions :)

Am trying to digest the SDK Programming Guide ATM.  It looks pretty clear so far that using Python would make certain things easier than using some other alternatives.

ewemoa:
To give a taste of what it might be like to use Python to work with VirtualBox, below is a modified example from the SDK docs to start a virtual machine.  The code runs on a host and starts up an already configured guest.  It seemed to work ok with a locally installed VirtualBox 4.0.8.


--- Code: Python ---from vboxapi import VirtualBoxManagervirtualBoxManager = VirtualBoxManager(None, None) vbox = virtualBoxManager.vboxmgr = virtualBoxManager.mgrprint "Version is", vbox.version def machById(id):    mach = None    for m in virtualBoxManager.getArray(vbox, 'machines'):        if m.name == id or mach.id == id:            mach = m            break    return mach name = "Windows XP SP3"mach = machById(name) if mach is None:    print "cannot find machine", nameelse:    session = mgr.getSessionObject(vbox)    progress = mach.launchVMProcess(session, "gui", mach.id)    progress.waitForCompletion(-1)    session.close()

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