Happy Friday, everyone!

Our tip this week is from an excellent white paper written by our own Greg King titled Oracle VM 3: Building a Demo Environment using Oracle VM VirtualBox. In it, Greg gives you everything you need to know to set up Oracle VM Server inside of Oracle VM VirtualBox for testing and demoing. The section we're highlighting below is on how to configure the network interfaces of your virtual machines:

VirtualBox comes with a few different types of network interfaces that can be used to allow communication between the VM guests and the host operating system, including network interfaces that will allow the VM guests to communicate with local and wide area networks accessed from your laptop or personal computer. However, for the purpose of the demonstration environment we will limit the network communication to include access just between your desktop and the virtual machines being managed by VirtualBox.

The install process for Oracle VM VirtualBox creates a single host-only network device on your laptop or personal computer. Using the host-only network device will allow you to open a browser on your desktop to access the Oracle VM Manager running within the VirtualBox VM guest. The device will only allow network traffic between the VM guests and your host operating system, but nothing outside the confines of your laptop or personal computer.

We will need to add a second host-only network since the Oracle VM Server appliance has both eth0 and eth1 configured. You can choose to use eth1 on the Oracle VM Servers or not use them – the choice is yours. But, at least the host side network device will exist if you decide to use it.

Greg goes on to describe in detail how to setup the network interfaces, so you can head on over to the paper and get even more info.

See you next week!

-Chris