[Solved] Mimicking a physical network using VMs

[maystorm]

Hi folks,

We are going to mimic/mirror a physical network setup using virtual machines and would need some help setting things up.

The existing physical network setup consists of two networks 172.16.10.x and 172.30.1.x, one having two client PCs and one Gateway, and the other having one server PC and another Gateway:

• Code: Select all

  Client-1:  172.16.10.1/24, GW: 172.16.10.254
  Client-2:  172.16.10.2/24, GW: 172.16.10.254
  Gateway-1: 172.16.10.254
  
  Server:    172.30.1.21/24, GW: 172.30.1.254
  Gateway-2: 172.30.1.254

The Gateways are configured such that the clients and the server can see each other.

Obvioulsy, we would need to create a minimum of three VMs: two for the clients and one for the server. However, how do we need to configure them that they see each other? Do we need to activate more than one NIC on the VMs? Should they be set up as brigded or internal? Do we also need to create VMs to emulate the Gateways or can the client and server VMs be configured to work without Gateways?

As we are not very experineced with networking in Virtualbox we would very much appreciate some guidance.

TIA!

[maystorm]

After having tried a number of different scenarios it looks that we will go for following VM setup:

1) We will set up two "Host-only Networks" under "File -> Preferences -> Network": vboxnet1 configured as 172.16.10.200, vboxnet2 configured as 172.30.1.200
2) Each VM (both clients and the server) will get two NICs with type "Host-only Adapter", one assigned to vboxnet1 and the other assigned to vboxnet2
3) Inside each VM we will assign a dummy IP address to the second ethernet card (such as 172.16.10.21 for the server and 172.30.1.1/172.30.1.2 for the clients)

With the a.m. setup the routing (i.e. clients and server see each other) is done w/o using separate VMs for the Gateways. This seems to work for us.

[maystorm]

Just found out that it is even easier to use type "internal network" and assign all NICs to the same internal network instead of using two different "host-only adapters".