Working With Headless Virtual Machine

Yesterday, i was trying to learn new thing: configuring a headless virtual machine. I need this one as i will teach Internet Application Engineering this semester and i'm hoping to provide a hosting site for the students to upload their work, but i don't want to risk the available systems, so i decided to try on building a virtual machine on top of the current system.

I'm used to VMWare, but i don't know if VMWare does offer headless virtualization, so i tried to use Virtual Box from Oracle. It took me a while to learn about all the command line options, but finally i managed to build the machine using Slackware 13.1 and configure it's services. I basically only need small number of services, which are HTTP, Database (MySQL), and SCP/SSH. I don't use FTP, since it's not secure and i want to make sure that all data transfer happened in secure channel.

For now, it has been working well, and i'm still configuring several things, including the possibility of having SVN or any other SCM tools (they are already installed actually, but i will try to provide web-svn access for the students). Not bad for something new and being worked under 24 hours