virtualbox.org

Hi,
I'm looking for the quickest simplest way to make my VM visable on the LAN, and for the VM to see other physical PC's elsewhere on the LAN. At present, my VM has internet connectivity but thats all. Its working through the virtualbox's NAT system as its a default install.

It occurs to me that the reason NetBIOS doesn't work is because the discovery bit is a broadcast protocol and is therefore limited to the VM Subnet, which by default is 10.0.2.0

Setting up Port forwarding in the NAT system would be a massive pain (I use that on my router between LAN and WAN - it was fiddly to get working) and I don't want to go this route. The bridging section in the manual sounds like I'm having to setup routing in the virtualbox.

Could I get away with changing the default IP address so it overlaps with my LAN and would this make broadcast traffic and therefore all other stuff work easily? ie my LAN is 10.0.0.1 to 254, but I only have 20 IP addresses in use, so if the VM IP's were say 10.0.0.100 to 254, but on the same subnet (ie 255.255.255.0), will they be visable to each other as if it was all a big physical LAN - will they be visable if some machines are VM machines?

I suppose its a bit like asking, can the physical NIC have multiple IP addresses, and can each IP address be allocated to a different VM ?

My end result is simply to get bombproof network visibility by all PC's (virtual or otherwise) between each other with maximum reliability and minimum hassle

sinkorswim wrote:I'm looking for the quickest simplest way to make my VM visable on the LAN, and for the VM to see other physical PC's elsewhere on the LAN. At present, my VM has internet connectivity but thats all. Its working through the virtualbox's NAT system as its a default install.
It occurs to me that the reason NetBIOS doesn't work is because the discovery bit is a broadcast protocol and is therefore limited to the VM Subnet, which by default is 10.0.2.0

AFAIK, only the 'Browser' part of MS networking uses broadcasts: that's the bit that make PCs appear in the 'Network Neighbourhood' section of Windows Explorer. If you directly map a network share, you can connect to a share outside VirtualBox's NAT, which I do.

sinkorswim wrote:The bridging section in the manual sounds like I'm having to setup routing in the virtualbox.

Nope. Just select it and you are away, and the VM is just like another PC on your lan.

sinkorswim wrote:Could I get away with changing the default IP address so it overlaps with my LAN and would this make broadcast traffic and therefore all other stuff work easily? ie my LAN is 10.0.0.1 to 254, but I only have 20 IP addresses in use, so if the VM IP's were say 10.0.0.100 to 254, but on the same subnet (ie 255.255.255.0), will they be visable to each other as if it was all a big physical LAN - will they be visable if some machines are VM machines?

I wouldn't think the overlapping subnet would cause packets to get bridged to and from the VirtualBox NAT subnet: I think it would just disconnect things.

sinkorswim wrote:My end result is simply to get bombproof network visibility by all PC's (virtual or otherwise) between each other with maximum reliability and minimum hassle

Bridge networking if you want other PCs to be able to connect to the VM's network shares, NAT works OK otherwise, just without the 'Browser' feature.