virtualbox.org

Hello all, I'm new to virtual machines and I'm trying to setup a guest server for my network but am confused by the way vbox does networking. The default mode is NAT, which I know does ip translations but what is it translating? My guest gets a DHCP assigned address in a different subnet than my host machine. I guess my question is, if I wanted to setup my guest for some sort of server, how would computers reach it and through what ip?

NAT stands for network address translation, so it is translating addresses. If you want to know how it works, just google NAT. It is a standard TCP/IP utility.

If you want the vm to be accessible from other machines on the network you need to use bridged networking, not NAT. The vm will then behave as if it was an additional machine on the physical network. If it set to get its network config from DHCP it should get it from the DHCP server on your LAN.