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I am part of a company that has grown rapidly with no real eye to how their Group Policy was being managed. It suddenly became apparent that it could be a powerful tool and I was stuck with mastering it though I have very little prior knowledge outside of some basic policy changes.

I picked up a book and it suggested I build a virtual test domain using VM's and virtualbox seemed the best option.

I have a trial install of Server 2012 and essentially all the Win7 Licenses I could want. I even had a saved .vdi of our basic workstations that I created two clients from

The trouble I have is I need to create a domain controller and have the two clients interact with the server, but have nothing on this test domain communicate with the outside world.

I followed the advice of one very simple how-to and set up all of them on a host-only network. However, when I fire up the guests, the server and the clients both, they cannot ping each other (Ping is enabled) and they are not pulling an IP Address. Ipconfig /all looks like this
Win7 Machine: The server I tried to configure (my first attempt) and was worried that it was causing the issue so I removed all domain roles, it still has a static IP, but is no longer part of a domain
Server: Neither of the clients can ping each other and do not appear to be acquiring an IP address. What am I doing wrong here?

The easiest and for most the best way to use and test Windows domains in VirtualBox
Setup Windows Domain in VirtualBox

Notice the use of Internal instead of host only.

I attempted using the internal network named it and had both machines startup

they can both ping 127.0.0.1 so the adapters are working

However, after setting them up with IP's

192.168.1.2 and 192.168.1.3 respectively and then
255.255.255.0 for the default gateway on both, they cannot ping each other. The firewall is off so ICMP is not blocking

It says Destination host unreachable

What gateway? The Internal does not need it and can be causing this problem. Start with the Basics until you get it to work. You also should use an IP range ( non-routable ) that is no where near anything that you would use. I normally set these test domains up with 10.0.0.*, no gateway until you get to that place.

Edit. Are you sure you don't mean subnet? ( 255.255.255.0 )

Subnet is 255.255.255.0. Sorry, mistyped

My configuration looks like this My settings in virtual box for each machine looks like this. However, my result is still this. I feel like there aren't that many things I could be goofing up here.

OK so help me understand. You have one or two guests configured to use internal? If you are trying to allow the host to work in this there is going to be a problem. Normally all domain parts go in the isolated domain so they don't interfere with the local LAN.

virtualGPOGuy wrote:I picked up a book...
they can both ping 127.0.0.1 so the adapters are working

Somehow you are making things way more complicated than they should be. Both for you and for us...

1. Why are you messing with the network settings since you don't understand them? For example, pinging 127.0.0.1 is like tapping yourself in the shoulder. It just works! Always! Even with no network adapters!
2. Host-only network (emphasis mine).
3. From your first post; IP:169.254.x.x, auto-configured. Not a good sign.
4. Internal network should have (by default) addresses in the range of 192.168.x.x. You manually changed them to the 10.x.x.x range. Why?

Another worrying part of your posts:

virtualGPOGuy wrote:I even had a saved .vdi of our basic workstations that I created two clients from

How exactly did you do that. As in File Copy-Paste in the Explorer? I have a bad feeling about this...

My advices: Start fresh. With the defaults. Internal-only network. Treat your VMs as you would a physical machine. On a real network. Do not mess with settings which you don't understand. Read the manual. Get the servers and clients installed (basic install) and then try to mess with domains.

1. I changed from 192.168.x.x to 10.x.x.x at Perryg's suggestion.
2. I work at a large company that runs many VM's but they are all within our home domain so no one is used to messing with internal networking. The VDI was created to save as an image that we use for imaging real hardware so it is just like treating it like our real hardware. Except our real hardware is ready for DHCP (hence my 169.254.x.x result in my first post as it was autoconfigured and couldn't find a DC from which to receive it's IP as there isn't one on the internal network only two "PC's")
Perry: I'm not trying to reach the host, I have 2 vm's exactly the same with one number difference in IP and ICMP is not blocked so ping should work and they are on the same virtual box network and they will not talk to one another.

I'm not trying to reach the host, I have 2 vm's exactly the same with one number difference in IP and ICMP is not blocked so ping should work and they are on the same virtual box network and they will not talk to one another

So pick Internal and make sure both guests are using the same intnet. The network adapter should have been chosen for you at creation unless you changed it and should be the Intel PRO/1000. If the firewall has been modified in the guests to allow ICMP and you still can not ping then make sure that the check box for cable connected is enabled.

If this still does not work, you can temporarily set one of the guests to use NAT and see if they can reach the Internet. ( requires you set the guest network for dhcp ) If that works then the issue is with the guest setup somehow.

I figured out my problem. My two clients were clones of one another and that made them incompatible in some way. Two fresh builds from ISO and I had no issues, and I was still able to use the one client built from the .vdi file without issue so I can have 3 clients, one of them a high fidelity match for our users in my test/learning environment.

Onward to learning how to setup a dhcp/dns domain controller in Server 2012!

All you needed to do to get the networking going was to change the MAC address of the network card on one of the clones. Clones are identical, right down to MAC addresses. Networking fails because the networking software cannot distinguish one vm from the other.