Network Setup for your Virtual Environment

Once we have installed our Hypervisor, we can start implementing and inteconnecting various VMs.The VM adapter can run on different modes

• NAT (Network Adress Translation) - Default Option
• Bridged Adapter
• Internal networking
• Host-only networking
• NAT with Port Forwarding
• Not attached (No NIC)

NAT is a cool technlogy, but because I want to keep networking under my control, I avoid using it. For example, I want to give my VM Hosts specific IPs, I may want the internet traffic to path through a specific Router etc. 

With the NAT setup, each VM can get an IP Address from the Hypervisor, which also acts as a gateway in order the VMs to be able to access outside networks. 

You can setup the NAT networking, by simply going to File > Preferences...

Network TAB and Add new NAT network.

But as I mentioned I will not use any type of NAT networks on any of my Labs. My typical options are:

• Internal networking - This is my option when I want to create a network that doesn't  have to communicate with the outside world.
• Bridged Adapter  - This is my default option. The virtual NIC is bridged to one of the Phycial NICs of your Host. This is the easiest way to connect a VM to your physical network, and to the Internet. 
• Host-only networking - I use this option when I want to connect my VMs with GNS3

Initial setup for your Virtual Environment (Oracle VirtualBox)

To test real life scenarios we will need different applications to run and work together, for example an Email, a (DS) Directory Services, a Domain Name System (DNS) , an NTP (Network Time Protocol) Server, a Router etc. Some applications can co-exist on the same “box”, for example a DS and DNS,  but in most cases we will need more than one servers.

So how can we run multiple servers on one physical entity. The answer is simple – Virtualization. We will need a HyperVisor, “a proccess that can create and run Virtual Machines”. (https://www.vmware.com/topics/glossary/content/hypervisor)

There are two different paths that we can choose.

1. Install a Type-2 Hypervisor on top of our Operating System (OS) such as
VMWare Workstation Pro: https://www.vmware.com/uk/products/workstation-pro.html
Oracle Virtual Box: https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

2. Install a Type-1 (Bare Metal) Hypervisor, for example
VMWare ESXi: https://www.vmware.com/uk/products/esxi-and-esx.html
Microsoft Hyper-V: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-hyper-v-server-2019

The Oracle Virtual Box Hypervisor will be my choice, since it is free to use and also VirtualBox is a Type-2 Hypervisor, so the Application runs inside the Operating System. This means that we won’t need another Computer to connect and administer our environment, our (Virtual Machines) VMs.

The installation is very simple. We will use Windows 7 OS.  I think Windows 7 is a very stable OS, it runs much faster and uses less resourses than any newer Windows version. In addition, I have disabled most Visual Effects, to improve performance. I want my OS to use minimum resources, since most of CPU, RAM and Disk will be consumed by my Virtual Environment.  If my OS is taking up a lot of resources, then my VMs will suffer.

The current Virtual Box release (2018-12-26) is VirtualBox-6.0.0-127566-Win
You can also find a beta version that may support more features