I was curious how to do that so I asked ChatGPT, and it gave me a solution involving a Scheduled Task and a script that accesses the 'controlvm' command with VBoxManage.exe. I didn't think of using the host shutdown as the trigger instead of the service stop. I've looked into ways to cleanly shut down the guest on stop of the Windows service we use for VM startup, but did not find a solution for that. I didn't know it was possible to delay host shutdown until guests are safely shut down, though. Our program takes database backups 3 times a day and copies them to the shared folder, so re-importing the guest is not the end of the world for us if it doesn't happen too often. Scottgus1 Yes the ugly shutdowns are definitely not ideal, but as guest corruption has been very rare in our testing and in production, we've accepted the risk in favour of keeping our solution to have the VMs start on host boot without a user login. Logs - after restart.zip Logs After VM Restart (230.9 KiB) Downloaded 1 time Logs - before restart.zip Logs Before VM Restart (227.95 KiB) Downloaded 2 times I hope these have some information in them that can help narrow down the issue. The first zip is from before I restarted the VM (when it was not accessible via SSH), and the second zip is after I restarted (when it booted into the initramfs prompt). I forgot to grab the host specs but I can do that next time we're on the client's computer. McAfee is installed on the computer, but the trial is expired so I don't think it's doing anything. It doesn't seem like the issue corresponds with host reboots or Windows updates.

After a reboot, I got the initramfs prompt. The VM normally runs in headless mode under the local system account, so I wasn't able to 'Show' the console. This time, I was not able to connect via SSH.

When I tried re-booting the VM, it booted into the 'initramfs' prompt, which we usually take as a sign of corruption and resort to a re-import. The first time I was on to troubleshoot, I was able to connect to the VM via SSH and it seemed like the whole filesystem was read-only. This is the only Windows 11 instance with this problem. One instance in particular periodically gets corrupted every few weeks and we need to re-import our VM image.

We have a few instances installed on Windows 11.

My company distributes software that runs on Ubuntu guests in VirtualBox.

Virtualbox ubuntu server 20.04