Part 3: Advanced — Using a Dual Network Interface Setup with a Host-Only Interface

Setting up VirtualBox with an additional host-only interface gives you the flexibility of connecting directly from the host machine to the guest machine. It also helps you eliminate the possibility of any inadvertent networking weirdness that might occur when managing the connections of a whole slew of virtual machines talking to the host machine.

But if you don’t care about such things—or if networking issues give you a headache—turn away now. The basic setup tutorial should be enough for you.

Let’s get started.

You will basically be setting up a static IP network within the 192.165.65.x subnet on the host-only adapter. So your virtual machine will have a standard 10.0.2.x address on the main network interface and another IP address within the 192.165.65.xsubnet on the secondary host-only virtual interface.

The first step in setting up a host-only adapter happens in the main VirtualBox interface.

1. Go to the VirtualBox menu.
2. Then choose Preferences.
3. Within Preferences, select Network.
4. And then choose Host-only Networks.

There should be at least one item in the pane called vboxnet0. If you do not see anything in that list—let alone vboxnet0—don’t worry. Just click the small icon that looks like a small PCI network interface card with a green “+” plus symbol to add one.

You only need to add two items to create a new adapter:

1. The IPv4 address of 192.168.56.1.
2. The IPv4 network mask of 255.255.255.0.

And then click the DHCP pane and make sure the DHCP server is disabled since this will be a static network.

Okay, got that? When all that is done your base VirtualBox host installation now has a new network interface that can be used for any/all of your virtual machines.

Now to set it up on a guest machine just highlight whatever VirtualBox virtual machine you would like to to have this adapter and:

1. Click Settings.
2. Then choose Network.

At this point you should see an Adapter 1 pane and that should be set to NAT. Don’t touch that, but now click the Adapter 2 pane and:

1. Check the Enable Network Adapter box.
2. And then for the Attached to: pull down select Host-only Adapter.
3. And then under Name select vboxnet0.
4. Once that’s all set, just click OK and you’re done.

Conclusion.

Now when you launch your virtual machine, you can connect to the gateway address of the host-only adapter, which is 192.168.56.1. So if you were connecting to MAMP via this setup, the address would be:

http://192.168.56.1:8888

And then when editing the hosts file the entries would be something like:

192.168.56.1    MY_MACHINE
192.168.56.1    MY_MACHINE.local

The other benefit of this setup is on your Windows machine you can setup a static IP address—like for example 192.168.56.10—and use that address to connect from your host setup to your guest setup.

Again, for basic Windows browser compatibility testing, that might not be a factor but it is a nice option to have. And having a separate network interface for host-only traffic can help eliminate the potential issues associated with having all traffic going through the main 10.0.2.2 interface.