How can I tell what resolution a VM is running at with VirtualBox?

Question

I have some VirtualBox VMs running. Is there any way to programatically get the resolution they are running at? The guest VMs are running Windows XP.

Answer 1

Simplest solution : Write a program to get the screen resolution and store it to a shared location or send it via network to the host machine. Put this program in the startup of each VM.

Answer 2

Parse the output of vboxmanage showvminfo <name>|<uuid>. For example:

C:\> vboxmanage showvminfo "Dev Server"
...
Video mode:      1360x768x32
...

You can also add the --machinereadable flag to make parsing easier. It outputs the information as key-value pairs:

VideoMode="1360,768,32"