Connect multiple guests on multiple hosts

[gerpose]

Hi all.

Maybe someone here can help me in what I'm trying to do.
In my office network we have multiple hosts (windows, ubuntu, mac) and I created a win xp guest so we can play some old games.
The idea is to set up a basic win xp machine with some games and then share it with my co-workers so we don't have to install everything on all machines.

The problem is that once we all have the win xp guest we need to be on the same network so we can play through lan tcp-ip.

Any ideas on how I must configure the hosts and the guests so I can achieve this?

Thanks in advance.

[socratis]

First of all, sharing a VM concurrently is like trying with all your co-workers to play on the same computer concurrently. You can't. A VM is not a "shared" application, like you're installing Notepad++ and you're running it from the server. It needs its own virtual hardware and most importantly its own data, the virtual hard disk. You can't share hard discs, so you'd have to provision one for every XP VM.

What you could do is to "finalize" your master XP VM and then make a copy, a clone, to each of your co-workers computers. You have to change some things in each VM, like the network name of each clone, the network addresses of each clone, etc., etc. Anything that can conflict. Oh, and you'll need separate XP licenses for each VM.

Assuming you got past all this, the easiest (if not the only) way would be to use bridged mode networking. Using this mode, the various XP VMs would appear as another computer connected to the network, that's why you're going to be cloning them and changing their attributes, to make them unique in the network.

[gerpose]

Thanks for your reply.

Yes you're right, I forgot to mention that. The idea is to have a, let's say, "stable" XP vm with all the software and games we want and then make the modifications on each host computer needed to make this work.

Can you explain a little more the configuration I need to do this?

Actually I have a network adapter on NAT so I can access the web on the guests. Do I need to add another adapter on bridged mode?

Also I read that the way to do this is using UDP tunnel networking but I didn't undestand how to do it.

[socratis]

Can you explain a little more the configuration I need to do this? Actually I have a network adapter on NAT so I can access the web on the guests. Do I need to add another adapter on bridged mode?

You could switch the NAT to Bridged. That way you'll have your cake and eat it too.

Be careful though, because Bridged and WiFi don't always play nice. Bridged networking is outside the WLAN specification. It may or may not work. Some combinations of Routers/Access Points, WLAN cards and drivers work, some don't. See: Bridging & Wifi - Supported hardware.

[gerpose]

Thanks!

We can now see all vms from each others hosts.

Thank you very much!