Some systems reported as powered off / aborted when they are active / running

[kihjin]

I have several VMs running in headless mode. When they were first started, their State was reported correctly as "running".

For whatever reason, and this has happened frequently, the VirtualBox book keeper service forgets that some of them are running. This problem isn't new to version 3, I don't recall the version at which it became a nuisance.

To check the state of the systems, I use vm list vms --long | grep State. Currently, VirtualBox is reporting several systems as "powered off" or "aborted" when they are running just fine. They respond to ping, ssh and other network services.

These systems do not appear in vm list runningvms

A consequence of this problem is that RDP for these system no longer works. Any attempt to communicate with the system using vboxmanage controlvm fails because as far as VirtualBox is concerned, the system is NOT running. These are headless systems, so RDP access is critical. I can't even savestate the systems.

The first question is why does the service forget about them or lose connection with them? That is a difficult problem to solve, though should be solved nonetheless.

In the mean time, I'd like to force the service to rescan or reconnect with these faux-offline systems. How can this be accomplished? I'm guessing that if it is possible at all, it would require the use of the SDK. This is OK, I would just like to be pointed in the right direction.

[Frank Mehnert]

Your observation sounds like the VBoxSVC daemon crashed. Please reopen if this issue is still relevant with VBox 3.1.8 / 3.2.4. In that case please try to generate a ​core dump.