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I'm pretty new to VMs, so this might be a dumb question, but is it possible for a VM to have a MAC address different from the host's?

I'm trying to assign the guest machine a static IP, but my router (also DHCP server) says they have the same MAC. The guest's name also appears as the host's.

Host is running Win7 64-bit. Guest OS is WinXP 32-bit.
Settings for the adapter are:
Attached to: Bridged
Name: Broadcom WLAN
Type: PCnet-FAST III
Promiscuous Mode: Allow All
Cable connected is checked.

Internet access works fine. Ping does too (though the guest can't be pinged by machine name).

I know next to nothing about networking, so advice would be greatly appreciated!

This is probably just a misunderstanding. The vm must have a different MAC address from the host, and probably does.

With bridged networking, the host and the vm are sharing the physical NIC of the host. The router will send the packets for both the host and the guest to this physical device. The VirtualBox filter driver and the device driver in the host work together to sort out what packets go where. Bridging does not always work properly with wireless devices because they have problems handling this.

Does your vm get a different IP address from the host? Can you contact the vm from a LAN machine using this IP address?

Thanks for the reply. I see - I'm guessing there's nothing I can do about that then, besides getting a compatible router? Yes, it gets its own IP and can be contacted like any other machine.

cajole wrote:Yes, it gets its own IP and can be contacted like any other machine.

If the VM is being assigned an IP by the router then the VM probably has its own MAC.

Are you habitually suspending the VM? I had what may be a similar problem in the physical world, with a Win8.1 tablet that kept messing up the WLAN IP tables and conflicting with a wireless printer. When the tablet was on standby, I suspect it was waking up every now and then and communicating with a lease-expired IP (in fact I know it was, I could see it in the router logs), and causing errors on the network. I had to use address reservation in the router to eliminate the conflicts.