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virtual-machinevirtualboxgenymotion

Why does virtualbox interface need admin permission so many times?

I have been using VirtualBox for 4 years now. I run it as a non-admin user and it worked fine. No admin permissions were required to run or boot up any VM.

Recently I installed the GenyMotion Android emulator on my host machine. It uses Virtualbox to create and run VMs. This genymotion needs admin permissions when I run the genymotion device manager. They say it is because it needs to create and/or access the VirtualBox interfaces (network interfaces). So every time I have to start genymotion, the admin permission (on Windows) pops up, and I have to enter the admin password. This keeps happening like 10-15 times (sometimes even more). What it does is that it creates multiple VirtualBox host-only ethernet adapters with these permissions (one for each adapter). It is really annoying to enter the password so many times. So instead, what I do is that I run Genymotion as administrator. So the admin permissions that were required for VirtualBox Interface are automatically granted.

The problem is that, now whenever I want to run a VM from VirtualBox manager, the same permissions pop up asking for admin privileges for the VirtualBox interface.

How can I get rid of these multiple admin permission pop-ups? I don't run VirtualBox as an admin and I don't want to.

Solution

  • This should not happen: permissions should only be asked the first time Genymotion is run, not always. And yes, it is required, mostly beacause MS have reinforced security with Win10. Basically, all that Genymotion does is calling vboxmanage command line tool from VirtualBox to perform several tasks at startup:

    • ask the list of installed devices
    • verify that there is at least one existing host-only interface and it is available (and create one if necessary)

    Unfortunately, each time vboxmanage is called, it requires admin rights from Windows and you get an UAC. If this happens all the time, it probably means that your Windows security settings are too tight: with default settings, the UAC only pops-up the first time you run Genymotion.

    One final word: VirtualBox + Win10 = real pain in the a**. I use Ubuntu whenever I want to use VirtualBox or Genymotion and it works "out of the box"; no hassle, no annoying UACs nor mysterious VirtualBox errors :-)