Wednesday, March 28, 2012

How to Connect 2 Windows 2008 R2 VisualBox VMs with virtual network

       When you create 2 Windows 2008 R2 VisualBox VMs, you must want to connect them together with virtual network to form a small LAN. Your goal is these 2 VMs must have internet access and be able to access each other by sharing and HTTP. Following are the steps how to setup with VisualBox 4.1.10:

       1. You need to install AD Domain Service and DNS roles on the VM works as domain controller. At the end of this step, you setup your local domain.

       2. Shutdown both VMs, add second network adapter to both VMs selecting "Host-only networking" mode.

       3. Start both VMs, you will find a new network connection. In its property, set DNS server address to your domain controller and disable TCP/IP V6. Restart both VMs.

       4. Join the VM to your domain.
 
       You will still have some small issues, such as, you can not enable network discovering. But actually you can access each VMs' shared resources. Another problem is you can only access the website on the other VM by IP (for example, http://192.162.3.66, rather than http://Yukon). I believe you can figure that out easily.