Networking Setup Help

[WonkeyDonkey]

Hi all,

Its my first post here so please be gentle; I have done some searches but couldn't find what I was looking for, and it relates to my chosen network setup.

First up the hardware and setup for the host :

iMac late 2013, 32Gb Ram, 512 Gb SSD, running OSX 10.10.5.
I use wifi for internet, ethernet is switched off, 2 x thunderbolt interfaces are available (Not currently in use).

All guests will be Windows 7 Professional.

What I want to achieve for the networking setup is :

1. Each guest to have net access to obtain Windows updates etc; this is pretty straight forward using the default NAT.

2. Each guest to be able to talk to each other and the host using a private network, where I will then enable the various ports required.

The guests (I expect 4 or 5 in total) will run small servers, database etc.

My thought is to define 2 x network adaptors for each guest, the first for NAT and the second for the private network. (These need to be isolated from each other so that the server related services are not accessible from the outside world).

So what would be the best option for those second network adaptors for the private network ?

I tried both internal and host only but couln't get them to see the host. I also setup virtual networks in Prefs > Network > Nat Network & Host Only Network but couldnt get them to see the host.

My existing broadband router uses 192 addresses so I would like to keep the private network on something totally different, maybe 172 or 10.

Any thoughts would be much appreciated

On a side note, I am running the latest test build which is the only one I could get working with aero effects in Windows 7.

[BillG]

You do not need two network adapters in each vm. You only need one for the private network. What you do need is an additional vm to act as a router between the private network and the physical network. You do not control networking in the private LAN from the host - you do it from the virtual router.

You configure it just like you would configure a physical private network accessing the Internet through a DSL router. The router does NAT for the private clients. The only difference is that all of this is running inside your physical NAT router. The "private" interface of your virtual router is in the private virtual network and its "public" interface is in the 192.x.x.x network and gets its IP address from your broadband router (you put it in bridged mode linked to the physical NIC of the host).

You can use a different 192. address for the private LAN if you like. You do not have to use 172. or 10.

e.g.

Internet
|
broadband router
192.168.0.1
|
192.168.0.X
virtual router
192.168.66.1
|
private virtual LAN
192.168.66.x

[WonkeyDonkey]

Thanks for the reply.

So I have the first vm setup with plain old NAT and can access the internet. It has an IP of 10.0.2.2.

Now I want to add the second and third vm's. What netork option (NAT/NAT Network/Bridged/Internal/Host Only) should I be adding to each of these ?

[BillG]

Nothing. That is the default setup to run one vm with Internet access.

Read my post again. The vms attach to the internal network only. They access the Internet through the virtual router.

What you are trying to do is moderately complex, but the complications are networking, not VirtualBox. You really should seek help from a friend who understands networking, or post in a networking forum. The VirtualBox component is trivial. The vms connect to the internal virtual network only. They access the physical network (and hence the Internet) through a virtual router.