David Latham

Oracle Virtual Machine (OVM) 3.1.1. was released on the 8th May 2012 and finally it's supported on VirtualBox.  This is great news for anyone who wants to give installing an OVM Lab a go. I gave it a go. I created 3 VirtualBox guests: Openfiler for iSCSI with a 40GB virtual disk for chopping up into LUNs and iSCSI. Oracle Linux 6.0 on which I installed OVM 3.1.1. in Demo mode.  This guest has 4GB of RAM assigned to it and a 25GB HD.  Probably a bit big, but OVM is a large application with an Oracle XE database and Oracle Weblogic services installed, I thought better safe than sorry. Oracle Virtual Server 3.1.1.  This guest had just a 4GB HD and 1536MB of RAM which I figured would be just enough to get 1 virtual machine up and running on it. My VirtualBox is configured with a couple of host only networks: vboxnet0 => 192.168.56.0/24 => Management network.  I also have dnsmasq configured on this network to serve IP addresses via DHCP to clients on this network.  Dns

VirtualBox does a fairly good job with the built in NAT feature on the virtual network device. But there are some drawbacks:  You can't easily monitor the network on the built in NAT.  So if your VM is misbehaving, you couldn't use tcpdump to troubleshoot. The built in NAT reaches directly to the Internet in a transparent manner.  If you wanted to control access to the Internet you would have to switch to a bridge device or go with host-only. Most importantly for me, it does not support GRE packets very well.  This means that if you want to access a Microsoft PPTP VPN from your VM, it won't work with the VirtualBox built in NAT. (Well it didn't for me anyway) EDIT: An updated script for the firewall component is described in a new post found here:  http://david-latham.blogspot.co.nz/2013/03/firewall-script-for-opensuse-and-others.html So with some simple tweaks to your host, you can NAT the VirtualBox host only network and enjoy some extra features. In Virtua