How To Setup Bridge Networking for Virtualbox in Windows

I am a big fan of Sun's Virtualbox. I have written about it in the past. I still like it better than VMWare when running it on my local workstation to create test boxes and such on the fly. It is lighter, and simpler than VMWare desktop for the most part. The thing it doesn't do too well is bridged networking.

The bridged networking never bothered me before. I just would use NAT and be done with it. However today I had to do some testing of an antivirus suite I am evaluating and needed to have a machine I could infect with Antivirus 2009. This machine needed to be bridged so it could successfully report back to my test server.

You can however configure Virtualbox for bridged networking, you just have to do some simple fenagling. To configure your Virtual machine for bridged network in Windows do the following:

• Open Virtualbox, select the VM you need bridged networking on.
• In the right panel, click on "Network".
• The settings box will pop up.
• Look under Host Interfaces. You will not see anything listed there.
• Click the "Add New Host Interface (Ins)" button.




• Give the interface a name. I called mine "VirtualBox Host Interface 0". Click Ok.
• Changed the "Attached to" drop down box to Host Interface. Click Ok.




• Now click on Start>Control Panel>Network Connections.
• Click on your NIC, then hold down control and click on your new VirtualBox host interface you just created. Right click and select "Add to Bridge".




• A new network bridge will be created, and now your VirtualBox will operate in Bridged mode!

I hope that helped you out. If you know of a good write up on how to do this on Ubuntu I would like to know. Hit me up with a link in the comments.

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