virtualbox.org

I've been getting familiar with using VirtualBox on a Windows 7 host for development and then deploying those VMs on a Linux server. I was especially interested when reading about the networking options and how for example you could have a database server VM with host only networking and a webserver VM which would have a host only network adapter to connect with the database and a bridged adapter to serve requests externally, then bundle all that up into a single appliance to deploy to production. What I have questions about is what is the current best practice for managing the IP addresses when developing such an appliance. It seems that VirtualBox (at least on Windows) has one host only network which is shared across all VMs and it has a built in DHCP server which doesn't allow you to specify a fixed IP address for a given MAC address (though I believe VirtualBox on Linux does have this option), and VirtualBox itself doesn't have a DNS server. So in that example where you have a database VM and a webserver VM that you're developing on a Windows host how are people managing the IP addresses given to the VMs and does this mean they're using IP addresses instead of names to connect the webserver to the database VM? And then when you export that virtual appliance containing 2 VMs as an OVA file it seems that you'd have to reconfigure the IP addresses on the new host and break the black box nature of the appliance.

What am I missing?