[vbox-dev] Intended Purpose

[Maxime Dor]

Hi Klaus,

On 24/01/2013 17:34, Klaus Espenlaub wrote:
> It's a quite common setup, and like all similar setups it is bending 
> the definition of "host only" somewhat. It relies on the advanced 
> networking capabilities of the host OS, in this case Linux.
That's right, I am happy to hear it is not against your intentions.
> I guess you needed to tweak the guest VM configs a little as the DHCP 
> server for host only will not give out a router configuration and thus 
> the VMs will have no default route. 
In case anyone is interested for use cases : I have actually totally 
disabled the Virtualbox DHCP servers and use a combinaison of static IP 
for 2 of my ranges (one being the servers, the other being DEV 
environment) and I have put a DHCP IP helper on the 3rd NIC towards one 
of my DHCP/DNS/DC servers. Again, everything works beautifully.
> Adding more VMs will only have an effect on the setup if the traffic 
> increases. Eventually you might hit bandwidth limits (which are 
> reasonably high, depending on your hardware), especially if you have a 
> lot of traffic going through the router. 
Good to hear it is not different then regular hardware!
> Having a routing VM achieves the best isolation since the networks are
> further away from the host, but if you're happy with your setup I see no
> immediate reason to make changes. With your setup you can wreck both the
> host and certain aspects of the VM connectivity by making changes to the
> iptables config. With a separate router VM it is clearly separated.
Thank you, I will keep using this setup for now then.
I could potentially wrack a few things, that is correct, but giving the 
current size of the infra, I won't add more work to it, but I will keep 
your recommendation in mind!

Again, thank you for your clear & precise answers, as well as the 
recommendations.

Max