4 Guest Additions
In addition to establishing the general mechanism of reading and writing values, a
set of predefined guest properties is automatically maintained by the VirtualBox Guest
Additions to allow for retrieving interesting guest data such as the guest’s exact op-
erating system and service pack level, the installed version of the Guest Additions,
users that are currently logged into the guest OS, network statistics and more. These
predefined properties are all prefixed with
/VirtualBox/
and organized into a hier-
archical tree of keys.
Note:
Currently this information is only available with Windows guests.
Some of this runtime information is shown when you select “Session Information
Dialog” from a virtual machine’s “Machine” menu.
A more flexible way to use this channel is via the
VBoxManage guestproperty
command set; see chapter
8.24
,
VBoxManage guestproperty
, page
124
for details. For
example, to have
all
the available guest properties for a given running VM listed with
their respective values, use this:
$ VBoxManage guestproperty enumerate "Windows Vista III"
VirtualBox Command Line Management Interface Version 3.0.0
(C) 2005-2008 Sun Microsystems, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Name: /VirtualBox/GuestInfo/OS/Product, value: Windows Vista Business Edition,
timestamp: 1229098278843087000, flags:
Name: /VirtualBox/GuestInfo/OS/Release, value: 6.0.6001,
timestamp: 1229098278950553000, flags:
Name: /VirtualBox/GuestInfo/OS/ServicePack, value: 1,
timestamp: 1229098279122627000, flags:
Name: /VirtualBox/GuestAdd/InstallDir,
value: C:/Program Files/Sun/xVM VirtualBox
Guest Additions, timestamp: 1229098279269739000, flags:
Name: /VirtualBox/GuestAdd/Revision, value: 40720,
timestamp: 1229098279345664000, flags:
Name: /VirtualBox/GuestAdd/Version, value: 3.0.0,
timestamp: 1229098279479515000, flags:
Name: /VirtualBox/GuestAdd/Components/VBoxControl.exe, value: 3.0.0r40720,
timestamp: 1229098279651731000, flags:
Name: /VirtualBox/GuestAdd/Components/VBoxHook.dll, value: 3.0.0r40720,
timestamp: 1229098279804835000, flags:
Name: /VirtualBox/GuestAdd/Components/VBoxDisp.dll, value: 3.0.0r40720,
timestamp: 1229098279880611000, flags:
Name: /VirtualBox/GuestAdd/Components/VBoxMRXNP.dll, value: 3.0.0r40720,
timestamp: 1229098279882618000, flags:
Name: /VirtualBox/GuestAdd/Components/VBoxService.exe, value: 3.0.0r40720,
timestamp: 1229098279883195000, flags:
Name: /VirtualBox/GuestAdd/Components/VBoxTray.exe, value: 3.0.0r40720,
timestamp: 1229098279885027000, flags:
Name: /VirtualBox/GuestAdd/Components/VBoxGuest.sys, value: 3.0.0r40720,
timestamp: 1229098279886838000, flags:
Name: /VirtualBox/GuestAdd/Components/VBoxMouse.sys, value: 3.0.0r40720,
timestamp: 1229098279890600000, flags:
73