virtualbox.org

I have no idea whether this is easy, hard or impossible. Any advice would be appreciated.

I have a wiki server in a Linux guest (openSuSE 11.4-32 with Gnome), running in Windows XP. I would like to wean myself off the Windows host, into openSuSE 11.4-64. Along the way, it would be helpful if I could run the same guest in both hosts, so that changes are preserved when switching hosts.

I have a computer with Windows XP-64, openSuSE11.4-64 and a data partition. My VMs are stored in the data partition. Both hosts and the guest are using VirtualBox 4.0.4 software. The guest uses bridged networking.

I tried what seemed obvious to me as a test: I copied the vmdk file from one folder to another, then created a New VM in SuSE and told it to use the copied file as the hard disk. The new VM booted without a hitch, and its browser could access the server, but I was completely unable to get the networking functional. In Devices | Network Adapters, the new VM had only one "Adapter," but it had a pull-down list showing two devices: eth0 and eth1, with an unconfigured eth1 as the default. Switching to my configured eth0 didn't work. Removing the configuration data (static IP) from eth0 and putting it in eth1 didn't work. In no case could I get "ping" to find anything outside the guest.

What can I try to get the network functioning? I am competent with both GUI and command line. Thanks!

If the VM is saved on a shared partition, then you can simply recreate the entire VM using the VDI of the VM on one Host. When creating a new VM, make sure that every single bit of the settings is the same. This also means the network MAC address, as Linux will create a new interface name when the MAC address changes.
For the shared drive, disable automatic defrag and never run it yourself manually. When you use Linux with that drive, Windows can corrupt the partition and forces a checkdisk. This is when you can loose data, most likely the VM disk. Been there, done that.

What you're asking has been asked before and I've explained the set up a couple of times. Please search on your topic title (or slight variations) with Google as shown in my signature to get the information.