VBoxHeadless by itself isn't all that handy for appliance type applications, since it doesn't detach itself from the shell it was started in automatically.

IMO, a better way of accomplishing this is VBoxManage startvm <VM Name> --type vrdp

VBoxManage will then start the VM and detach the process from the shell. The one downside to this method is that some errors from VBoxHeadless will end up getting suppressed, so if the VM fails to start, you may need to start it directly with VBoxHeadless to see what the issue is.

If you're using the OSE version of VBox (which lacks vrdp support), you can also use --type headless (since 3.0.0)

Here is a bash trick to easily detach any process from the shell it was started under.

In this example I do it with xterm .

  $ xterm &
  $ jobs
  [1]+  stopped   xterm &
  $ disown
  $ jobs
  $

You can close your current shell and xterm will still be running.

`disown` removes all of the shell's current jobs from the table of active jobs.

Awesome. I have never heard about `disown` before.

For the record, `screen` can do the same thing.