(W)LAN Adapter - Exclusive access for Guest

[Perryg]

Only if it is a USB adapter and you do not use VirtualBox for the network.

[BillG]

It means that VirtualBox is not involved in the network connection. The OS in the vm has access to the USB device and it connects directly to your wireless network. VirtualBox and the host OS are not involved.

[mpack]

However, what does "exclusively" mean? If you simply mean that you want the guest to use the hosts wireless adapter, and you don't want the host to use that adapter, then just use "bridged", and disable TCP/IP support for the wireless adapter in the host device manager.

[Perryg]

Read my post above. The only way to get exclusive use via wlan is if you have a usb wlan adapter. You can not assign an internal (host) wlan card. You can attach to it but then you will attach as a wired connection and the wlan specifications would not apply to the guest.

[BillG]

The network adapters which you can select from the settings of the vm are indeed all non-wireless cards. These are the adapters which VirtualBox can emulate. It does not emulate any wireless network cards.

The OS in the vm does not "see" the network adapters in the host machine. It sees the emulated card(s) in the vm. VirtualBox handles the way data received by the physical network card is transferred to the emulated device in the vm. (The emulated device in the vm will not appear as a wireless adapter, as noted above).

Do you have two network adapters in the host machine? If not, how is the host going to connect to the network if you give the vm exclusive use of the NIC?

If you do have two adapters in the host (or you are happy for the host to have no network access) you can use the method outlined by mpack. Select bridged mode for the network setting in the guest and link it to the wireless card of the host. At this stage both the host and guest will be able to access the network through this card. You can restrict access to the guest only by disabling access to the NIC from the host OS. How you do that depends on what your host OS is.

The other method suggested by Perryg is to use a USB wireless network adapter and capture the USB device from the vm. You would then install the adapter driver in the OS of the vm (but not in the host OS) and the virtual machine would have sole use of the wireless network connection. The VirtualBox networking options (NAT, bridged etc) would not be used by this connection.