VMs in Team Development Environment Howto?

[joyous]

I'm a team leader, building the production server environment.

Most of my team are not system admins and just code and I need to depend on their environments being totally consistent. They cannot work on the production server itself, as it is frequently client facing and hence needs to be stable. So, they work locally with VMs.

Hitherto, that has been VMWare, which seems to successfully establish a private local net with the ability given to the Guest to access needed external services (Facebook connect, Twitter, etc.). I'm against VMWare, as its solutions for Mac users have been limited. More and more devs use Mac OS. But I'm considering Fusion as I write this post.

I have tried all the Virtualbox solutions I can. Bridged networking seemed less than ideal, as if I distribute a VM to my team with static IP address, then all the team members' VMs will have the same IP on our LAN. If I allow DHCP to establish the guest's IP, then the team will have to adjust their Host's hosts file in order to browse the guest's Apache, changing each time they work because of the new IP. NAT: host/guest can't see each other, unless I'm an idiot. Host-only seemed great, except the guest cannot see outside the host. I suppose that is useful for some specific use.

We have no need for inter-VM communication, just a Host<->Guest net, with external web visible to the Guest, and the Guest's IP not conflicting in our LAN.

I want a solution like VMWare where the coder can just start working along side other coders using their VM. wget

Can this be done with Virtualbox?

Thanks very much - I really want to use VBox, and will be disappointed if it can't be used for team web development.

[vbox4me2]

Consider a more intelligent router that issues IP's based on MAC's, each VM can be distributed with uniqe MAC's which you manage in the router who manages dhcp ip's based on mac address, use Bridge on the Hosts. Each Host and its Guests can also be managed by using vlans, interconnections and who can do what can also be managed by a smart router including a smart dns server.