Advice on VirtualBox setup please?

[omega1]

Hello all,

I am looking for some advice/suggestions on the following setup.

I have a Windows 7 Pro Host and have set up various Windows XP Guests. At the moment I had used NAT on all of the guests, but I am running into problems, specifically when setting up FTP servers on the guests regarding passive mode and ports. I have also had to assign a load of ports for passive mode towards each guest.

I am wondering if I need to approach this from a different angle and use bridged mode?

What would be the best way to set this up? Also, if I move from NAT to Bridged, how do I route specif traffic to each guest machine, a task that I do now simply by assigning ports to the correct machine?

Thanks in advance.

[scottgus1]

Bridged will give your guests IP addresses in the same network as your host through whatever method your network hands out IP addresses. You can set static IP addresses in your guests, then use the port-forwarding in your router to send a certain port coming in on your internet IP address to the desired guest IP address.

[omega1]

I see...

So if, for example, I set my host to 172.26.0.1 and the guests to 172.26.0.2 and 172.26.0.3 I can then forward ports in the router rather than on VirtualBox?

If that is the case, then this leads me back to this question viewtopic.php?f=6&t=59213 Surely this would be possible in Bridged mode?

Thanks again for replying.

[scottgus1]

Personally this just about max's out my knowledge of networking. Static IP's in the guest and bridged network in Virtualbox will get your guests to look like separate PCs to the router. From your linked post,it sounds like you want to bring in multiple internet IP addresses through one NIC to the guests. I wouldn't know how to do that - I only have ever had to deal with one internet connection at a time. BillG's answer at the end sounds right. it's all going to come down to your router and its capabilities.

[omega1]

Personally this just about max's out my knowledge of networking.

I appreciate you sharing your knowledge, I've put it to the datacentre to let me know how they assign their IP addresses and whether or not this can be done...

Thanks.

[scottgus1]

Off-hand guess - does your router have a Static NAT page? On our Verizon router at work that page looks like external IPs can get routed to internal IPs.

[omega1]

Well I could do this at home, but I'm now in the hands of the datacentre where the physical machine is going to end up, so it's up to them to tell me how the external IP's get routed to the machine as I've only got one physical network, can they assign them 'in the router'?

We shall see...

[noteirak]

Do you already own an IP subnet in that datacenter? or only a single IP?