I had written blogs earlier on using Virtualbox and VMWare Player. I recently had a need to connect VMs running on Virtualbox and VMWare player. This is for my Windows laptop. I found the procedure mentioned in this link to be very useful. There are 2 options.
- Use bridged mechanism. Create a networking interface with bridged adapter on Virtualbox and map it to 1 of the physical adapters. Create a networking interface with bridged adapter on VMWare player and map it to the same physical adapter as Virtualbox. In this option, the connection between the 2 hosts is established through external router. It is possible that the router blocks this external communication. Even after clearing the firewall rules on the router, I was not able to get Virtualbox VM talk to VMWare player VM with this approach. I was able to get Virtual box VMs using bridged adapters to talk to each other, same with VMWare player. I feel that there is some filtering enforced either by Virtualbox or VMWare and I am not able to find the reason…
- Use host-only adapter mechanism. Create a host-only adapter on Virtualbox and create a networking interface on the VM and map it to the host-only adapter created. The host-only adapter can be configured with/without dhcp. Open “vmnetcfg” to map 1 of the VMWare adapters to bridged host-only adapter that was created with Virtualbox. I have captured details of “vmnetcfg” in my VMWare player blog. On the VM with VMWare player, create a networking interface and map it to the custom VMNetx interface that was bridged to the Virtualbox adapter. After this, the 2 VMs will be able to talk to each other using the host-only network. This option does not have the disadvantage of dependency on external router and firewall.
Sreenivas Makam's Blog 