Can I bring up the GUI for a Vagrant managed Virtual box while the box is running?

There are 3 ways I've found to get a gui on a running headless machine if you can see it in the VirtualBox Manager:

• You can suspend the machine (Close|Save State or vagrant suspend) and then start it again. When you restart it, you will see the GUI.

or, if you don't want to stop the machine at all:

• You can go to display settings and enable the Remote Display Server while it's running (you may want to change the default port), and then use an RDP viewer (On Windows use Remote Desktop Connection) to access the GUI.

• [Edit July 2015] With VirtualBox 5.0, click on the headless VM, choose "Show", and it will bring up the gui.

You'll have to do vagrant reload after enabling gui.

But there is a trick (a bit risky in my opinion) 1. save the state of the VM VBoxManage controlvm NAME_OR_UUID savestate 2. star vbox gui and resume

BTW: BTW: Why do you need GUI for Vagrant managed (headless) running VMs? If you prefer GUI to manage headless VMs, try phpVirtualBox.