#Virtualbox host only network series#
#Virtualbox host only network download#
#Virtualbox host only network mac#

In this way, we can reach any host which is also reachable from the host – including the host itself and any other virtual networks reachable from the host. When the answer comes back, the reverse process is applied and to the application, it looks like the reply came from a real network device. It then forwards the resulting packet to the network on the host system. How does this work? When an application within the virtual machine sends a TCP/IP packet to the virtual device, VirtualBox picks up the packet and performs a network address translation on it. To verify that you can actually reach servers on the Internet via this device. When you run route -n to list the content of the kernel routing tables, you will find that this is the default interface for outgoing traffic, with gateway IP address being 10.0.2.2.

#Virtualbox host only network mac#

This device has a MAC address and an Ethernet address assigned to it, usually 10.0.2.15.

Then, there is an interface enp0s3 which looks like an ordinary Ethernet device (but is of course a virtual device).

First, there is of course the standard loopback device lo which is present on every Linux system. You will find that there are two networking devices. Once you are logged into the machine, run ifconfig -a to get a list of all network devices.

#Virtualbox host only network download#

When you run this for the first time, Vagrant might have to download the used Ubuntu disk image, which might take a few minutes. To see this in action, switch to the lab1 directory and run Vagrant to bring up the example machine, then use Vagrant to SSH into the machine. The first networking mode that we will look at is called NAT networking and is actually the VirtualBox default. This is why I have chosen VirtualBox as an example hypervisor. Networking for VirtualBox is comparatively easy to understand, but still displays some of these ideas nicely. And finally, all these methods can be combined in a variety of different setups. This can be combined with VLANs, the usage of routing tables or iptables firewall rules to realize advanced networking topologies. Then, there are networking modes which allow you to connect one or more virtual machine using software-emulated ethernet bridges. First, there is typically a networking mode based on network address translation (NAT) to allow access to the internet from within the virtual machine. When you take a look at networking options of Linux based virtual machines like KVM, Xen or VirtualBox, you will find that certain networking modes tend to be common to all these virtualization solutions. The labs are stored in a Github reposítory that you should clone by running The setup of most examples is automated, using tools like Vagrant or Ansible that you will know when you have followed some earlier posts on this blog. We will also use Docker at times, so this should be installed as well.

For that purpose, you will need Vagrant and VirtualBox installed on your machine, which we use for most of the examples. To follow this series, I highly recommend to run the examples yourself.

#Virtualbox host only network series#

To provide the basics to understand all this, this series aims at introducing some of the more commonly used techniques using hands-on exercises. Networking itself is a non-trivial endeavor, and in the context of cloud and virtualization technology, you often stack different virtualization layers on top of each other. When you work with virtualized environments, you will sooner or later realize that a large part of the complexity of such environments originates in the networking part.