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25 vboxmanage guestproperty, Vboxmanage guestproperty – Sun Microsystems VIRTUALBOX VERSION 3.1.0_BETA2 User Manual

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8 VBoxManage reference

Subcommands may apply to all objects and metrics or can be limited to one object

or/and a list of metrics. If no objects or metrics are given in the parameters, the sub-
commands will apply to all available metrics of all objects. You may use an asterisk
(“*“) to explicitly specify that the command should be applied to all objects or metrics.
Use “host” as the object name to limit the scope of the command to host-related met-
rics. To limit the scope to a subset of metrics, use a metric list with names separated
by commas.

For example, to query metric data on the CPU time spent in user and kernel modes

by the virtual machine named “test”, you can use the following command:

VBoxManage query test CPU/Load/User,CPU/Load/Kernel

The following list summarizes the available subcommands:

list

This subcommand shows the parameters of the currently existing metrics. Note

that VM-specific metrics are only available when a particular VM is running.

setup

This subcommand sets the interval between taking two samples of metric data

and the number of samples retained internally. The retained data is available
for displaying with the query subcommand. The -list option shows which
metrics have been modified as the result of the command execution.

query

This subcommand retrieves and displays the currently retained metric data.

Note: The query subcommand does not remove or “flush” retained data. If
you query often enough you will see how old samples are gradually being
“phased out” by new samples.

collect

This subcommand sets the interval between taking two samples of metric data

and the number of samples retained internally. The collected data is displayed
periodically until Ctrl-C is pressed unless the -detach option is specified. With
the -detach option, this subcommand operates the same way as setup does.
The -list option shows which metrics match the specified filter.

8.25 VBoxManage guestproperty

The “guestproperty” commands allow you to get or set properties of a running virtual
machine. Please see chapter

4.11

,

Guest properties

, page

73

for an introduction. As

explained there, guest properties are arbitrary key/value string pairs which can be
written to and read from by either the guest or the host, so they can be used as a
low-volume communication channel for strings, provided that a guest is running and
has the Guest Additions installed. In addition, a number of values whose keys begin
with “/VirtualBox/“ are automatically set and maintained by the Guest Additions.

The following subcommands are available (where , in each case, can either be

a VM name or a VM UUID, as with the other VBoxManage commands):

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