This short article will describe how you will get quickly the IP for an headless running Virtualbox VM. For demonstration purpose, I have assigned an “Bridged Interface” on NIC 1. So the IP is dynamically allocated (IP address is being assigned by DHCP).

# start VM headless (if not running)
$ VBoxManage startvm --type headless "vm name"

# check VM state (optional)
$ VBoxManage showvminfo "vm name" | grep "State"

# show IP
$ VBoxManage guestproperty get "vm name" "/VirtualBox/GuestInfo/Net/0/V4/IP"
...
Value: 172.20.10.6
...

That was super easy … now you can connect via SSH (if SSH service is running).

# start SSH connection
$ ssh -C4 remote_user@172.20.10.6