VirtualBox Host interface networking is rubbish

Published on Thursday, July 17th 2008 at 10:43
Last updated on Monday, February 13th 2017 at 22:47

What a total nightmare it is trying to get VirtualBox’s host interface networking to work. The only way I can see to get it working on a windows host is by using ICS or a network bridge - both not possible on a 2003 Server. (please somebody prove me wrong.) Why can’t it be like VMWare and Just Work? Virtualbox’s user manual helpfully states “If your host is running Windows XP or newer, you can also use the built-in bridging feature to connect your host interfaces to your physical network card.” Last time I checked, Server 2003 R2 is newer than XP. Perhaps innotek did not envisage the need to run a VM on a server PC. Well, thats a morning wasted, now I am going to try to migrate the vmdk to VMWare instead. oh, joy.

EDIT: In case you need to know, you can convert VirtualBox-style VDI images to VMWare VMDK images by using qemu. the syntax is:

qemu-img convert original.vdi new.vmdk