Netowrking on VBox vs VMware

[drbrandman]

Have been using VMware Workstation for some time. Taking a close look at VirtualBox 2.06 running on Vista. Networking seens to be one of the biggest differences and not for the better. If there is an easier way, please let me know.

I am running two virtual machines, each Linux. Each vm has 2 virtual network coards. For each vm, eth0 is the "front end" network and eth1 is the back end network. Let's consider the backend network first. Wtih VMware, I would take each virtual adapter, point it to vmnet1, where vmnet1 is the virtual host only network adapter. I would configure vmnet1 on VMware to be on the 10.1.1.x network, and on the OS for each machine, they would have 10.1.1.x static IP addresses. This sort of works with vbox, except that the internal network of vbox doesn't allow me to ping or otherwise it, whereas with VMware, I could access from the host machine the backend network.

For the front end network, I would initially configure these as host only as well on the 192.168.1.x network using vmnet2. Then, when I would distribute these vm's to clients, client would have the choice of either leaving front end network in host only mode and this was viable because host applications could access 192.168.1.x addresses as well, or client could simply double clkck on ethernet icon of eth0 and change it to point to vmnet0 - the default bridged network. Then, the 192.168.1.x virtual adapter would share a connection on the host's real adapter and be visible to external applications (such as IE or Firefox). With vbox, beyond the issue of not being able to do this dynamically (i.e. on a running vm), one must take the additional step of going into Vista's (XP or Server 2003) network configuration setup and manual bridge the physical network adapter and virtual network adapter together.

Am I missing something here? Is there any way to access the internal (host only) back end network ports from the host? Is there any way for host interface prots to be bridged to the real network card without invoking the OS bridging support?

[Sasquatch]

The current setup needs the host bridge. You can create two or more virtual interfaces (if you run more than one VM at a time, this is needed), where one is bridged to the LAN adapter and one acts as a 'bridge' for the Host <> Guest communication.

On the next major release, there will be a new method of Host Interface, allowing you to select an interface directly like on MS VPC.