Running a VM without no GUI on the host

Software & Operating Systems Linux
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I was stating to mess with pfsense for a project, but am finding it a bit restrictive to add functionality to, so i would rather run debian server and have it auto start a pfsense virtaulbox and just pass through all the NIC cards i need (i have enough each OS can have it’s own ports and i can add more if needed) this way i can put all additional functionality on the debian server

i have never used a virtual OS without the host having a GUI, i would imagine the guest get assigned a TTY (eg ctrl+alt+f8) but i am not sure where to start for this

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Virtualbox can have VRDP on guests so you can connect using any RDP compatible viewer, if I remember correctly your Debian box would listen on different ports for different guests. For management I’ve heard talks about RemoteBox and headless VirtualBox server, but that’s all I know - you would have to research that on your own.

If you want to go the QEMU/KVM route I always found Red Hat Virtual Machine Manager useful and reliable. It does KVM, XEN and XLC and can do local or remote host over ssh, graphical or serial console.

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I also rep VMM.
You can install VMM on your desktop computer, and connect to a pool of VM’s on another computer, like the machine OP wants PFsense on

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Thanks for the suggestion, that worked nice

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Maybe Proxmox is a good fit? Its essentially Debian with Web Frontend for running and displaying VMs.

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I second using something like proxmox. Back in day I used to use xrdp on redhat based distro. So that I could rdp into linux and have gui. The normal way you would want do this is to add vnc to image. I have not used that in while. Usually way to check vmstatus from command line. At least know if the image up. I use pfsense in vm on esxi In generally the image loads pretty quickly. Then use pfsense webpage to due admin stuff.