virtualbox.org

Host PC = Intel Corei5 2.3GHz (quad-core), w/ 4GB (of which 32MB is for video card)
Host OS = Windows 7 Enterprise (64-bit)
VirtualBox = 4.2.12 r84980 (64-bit)

Guest OS = RedHat Enterprise Linux 5.8 (64-bit)

This post is about 2 questions:-

1. Guest OS installation was successful, but post VM restart, I get the message that GRUB bootloader 2nd stage is loading, and that I should press any key, to continue. However, most-often, pressing any key (tried several), I stay stuck at this point, and there seems to be no progress. After waiting for about 2 minutes, sometimes, it seems to proceed with the boot. Wondering what this hold-up is about ?

2. Would like to run 2 VM guest instances (both with RHEL-5.8 64-bit) on the host, and be able to have networking between the 2 VM guest instances, and also with the Windows7 host. The 2 VM guests should be configured with static-IP addresses. For now, I've selected the networking type to be "internal", but not sure if I can ssh into the guest VM's, from host using this type. Also, not clear as to what range IP-address are valid to be assigned within the VMs as static IP.

thanks,
bd

1. That would be a guest OS issue, but if you attach as zip the VM log file & the guest config out put (see Minimum information needed for assistance), we could have a look to see if something jumps to us about a missconfiguration.
2. Use host-only, and use the range of the host-only config

Thanks @noteirak.

Added the VBox.log attachment, and the guestconfig in ZIP'd format.

00:00:02.377011 Host RAM: 3887MB total, 1529MB available
00:00:02.683209 RamSize <integer> = 0x0000000060000000 (1 610 612 736, 1 536 MB)

The RAM shortage would typically cause your kind of issue here. You should give less RAM to your guest, or add RAM to the host, or free up some RAM.

Thanks @noteirak. Will try with reduced RAM allocated to the guest VM. Initially I had 1920MB allocated to it, and had reduced it. At previous levels, the hostOS came down to it's knees in performance, with what appeared like heavy swapping. I plan to double the host RAM as well, as next step, since the applications I plan to run in Guest are very memory intensive.

Yes swapping would kill here too - and is what saved your host from crashing & rebooting. But you need more RAM, that's for sure