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Starting VirtualBox will, by default, always open a window showing the screen of the virtual machine. Even though it’s possible to script a start of the VM by using:

virtualbox startvm <name_or_uid_of_your_vm>

…it will open a new window anyway.

Fortunately, it’s possible to trigger a start in so called headless mode which will start the VM without opening up a window whatsoever. You may use the startvm switch on VBoxManage (which offers way more options than the virtualbox command) to do so:

VBoxManage startvm --type headless <name_or_uid_of_your_vm>

The way I found out about this was through the help page, which always should be the first place to start your search:

VBoxManage --help

If you already know a switch called startvm exists, you can find out more about it’s options by calling:

VBoxManage startvm --help

To make a long story short: RTFM instead of “googling” the answer 😛