source: vbox/trunk/doc/manual/en_US/user_Networking.xml@ 32574

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<chapter id="networkingdetails">
  <title>Virtual networking</title>

  <para>As briefly mentioned in <xref linkend="settings-network" />,
  VirtualBox provides up to eight virtual PCI Ethernet cards for each virtual
  machine. For each such card, you can individually select<orderedlist>
      <listitem>
        <para>the hardware that will be virtualized as well as</para>
      </listitem>

      <listitem>
        <para>the virtualization mode that the virtual card will be operating
        in with respect to your physical networking hardware on the
        host.</para>
      </listitem>
    </orderedlist></para>

  <para>Four of the network cards can be configured in the "Network" section
  of the settings dialog in the graphical user interface of VirtualBox. You
  can configure all eight network cards on the command line via VBoxManage
  modifyvm; see <xref linkend="vboxmanage-modifyvm" />.</para>

  <para>This chapter explains the various networking settings in more
  detail.</para>

  <sect1 id="nichardware">
    <title>Virtual networking hardware</title>

    <para>For each card, you can individually select what kind of
    <emphasis>hardware</emphasis> will be presented to the virtual machine.
    VirtualBox can virtualize the following six types of networking
    hardware:<itemizedlist>
        <listitem>
          <para>AMD PCNet PCI II (Am79C970A);</para>
        </listitem>

        <listitem>
          <para>AMD PCNet FAST III (Am79C973, the default);</para>
        </listitem>

        <listitem>
          <para>Intel PRO/1000 MT Desktop (82540OEM);</para>
        </listitem>

        <listitem>
          <para>Intel PRO/1000 T Server (82543GC);</para>
        </listitem>

        <listitem>
          <para>Intel PRO/1000 MT Server (82545EM);</para>
        </listitem>

        <listitem>
          <para>Paravirtualized network adapter (virtio-net).</para>
        </listitem>
      </itemizedlist></para>

    <para>The PCNet FAST III is the default because it is supported by nearly
    all operating systems out of the box, as well as the GNU GRUB boot
    manager. As an exception, the Intel PRO/1000 family adapters are chosen
    for some guest operating system types that no longer ship with drivers for
    the PCNet card, such as Windows Vista; see <xref
    linkend="vista_networking" /> for details.<footnote>
        <para>Support for the Intel PRO/1000 MT Desktop type was added with
        VirtualBox 1.6. The T Server variant of the Intel PRO/1000 card was
        added with VirtualBox 1.6.2 because this one is recognized by Windows
        XP guests without additional driver installation. The MT Server
        variant was added with VirtualBox 2.2 to facilitate OVF imports from
        other platforms.</para>
      </footnote></para>

    <para>The <emphasis role="bold">"Paravirtualized network adapter
    (virtio-net)"</emphasis> is special. If you select this, then VirtualBox
    does <emphasis>not</emphasis> virtualize common networking hardware (that
    is supported by common guest operating systems out of the box). Instead,
    VirtualBox then expects a special software interface for virtualized
    environments to be provided by the guest, thus avoiding the complexity of
    emulating networking hardware and improving network performance. Starting
    with version 3.1, VirtualBox provides support for the industry-standard
    "virtio" networking drivers, which are part of the open-source KVM
    project.</para>

    <para>The "virtio" networking drivers are available for the following
    guest operating systems:</para>

    <para><itemizedlist>
        <listitem>
          <para>Linux kernels version 2.6.25 or later can be configured to
          provide virtio support; some distributions also back-ported virtio
          to older kernels.</para>
        </listitem>

        <listitem>
          <para>For Windows 2000, XP and Vista, virtio drivers can be
          downloaded and installed from the KVM project web page.<footnote>
              <para><ulink
              url="http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/WindowsGuestDrivers">http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/WindowsGuestDrivers</ulink>.</para>
            </footnote></para>
        </listitem>
      </itemizedlist></para>

    <para>VirtualBox also has limited support for so-called <emphasis
    role="bold">jumbo frames</emphasis>, i.e. networking packets with more
    than 1500 bytes of data, provided that you use the Intel card
    virtualization and bridged networking. In other words, jumbo frames are
    not supported with the AMD networking devices; in those cases, jumbo
    packets will silently be dropped for both the transmit and the receive
    direction. Guest operating systems trying to use this feature will observe
    this as a packet loss, which may lead to unexpected application behavior
    in the guest. This does not cause problems with guest operating systems in
    their default configuration, as jumbo frames need to be explicitly
    enabled.</para>
  </sect1>

  <sect1 id="networkingmodes">
    <title>Introduction to networking modes</title>

    <para>Each of the eight networking adapters can be separately configured
    to operate in one of the following five modes:<glosslist>
        <glossentry>
          <glossterm>Not attached</glossterm>

          <glossdef>
            <para>In this mode, VirtualBox reports to the guest that a network
            card is present, but that there is no connection -- as if no
            Ethernet cable was plugged into the card. This way it is possible
            to "pull" the virtual Ethernet cable and disrupt the connection,
            which can be useful to inform a guest operating system that no
            network connection is available and enforce a
            reconfiguration.</para>
          </glossdef>
        </glossentry>

        <glossentry>
          <glossterm>Network Address Translation (NAT)</glossterm>

          <glossdef>
            <para>If all you want is to browse the Web, download files and
            view e-mail inside the guest, then this default mode should be
            sufficient for you, and you can safely skip the rest of this
            section. Please note that there are certain limitations when using
            Windows file sharing (see <xref linkend="nat-limitations" /> for
            details).</para>
          </glossdef>
        </glossentry>

        <glossentry>
          <glossterm>Bridged networking</glossterm>

          <glossdef>
            <para>This is for more advanced networking needs such as network
            simulations and running servers in a guest. When enabled,
            VirtualBox connects to one of your installed network cards and
            exchanges network packets directly, circumventing your host
            operating system's network stack.</para>
          </glossdef>
        </glossentry>

        <glossentry>
          <glossterm>Internal networking</glossterm>

          <glossdef>
            <para>This can be used to create a different kind of
            software-based network which is visible to selected virtual
            machines, but not to applications running on the host or to the
            outside world.</para>
          </glossdef>
        </glossentry>

        <glossentry>
          <glossterm>Host-only networking</glossterm>

          <glossdef>
            <para>This can be used to create a network containing the host and
            a set of virtual machines, without the need for the host's
            physical network interface. Instead, a virtual network interface
            (similar to a loopback interface) is created on the host,
            providing connectivity among virtual machines and the host.</para>
          </glossdef>
        </glossentry>

        <glossentry>
          <glossterm>VDE (Virtual Distributed Ethernet) networking</glossterm>

          <glossdef>
            <para>This option can be used to connect to a Virtual Distributed
            Ethernet switch on a Linux or a FreeBSD host. It is only available
            if the VDE software and the VDE plugin library from the
            VirtualSquare project are installed on the host system. For more
            information on setting up VDE networks, please see the
            documentation accompanying the software.</para>
          </glossdef>
        </glossentry>
      </glosslist></para>

    <para>The following sections describe the available network modes in more
    detail.</para>
  </sect1>

  <sect1 id="network_nat">
    <title>Network Address Translation (NAT)</title>

    <para>Network Address Translation (NAT) is the simplest way of accessing
    an external network from a virtual machine. Usually, it does not require
    any configuration on the host network and guest system. For this reason,
    it is the default networking mode in VirtualBox.</para>

    <para>A virtual machine with NAT enabled acts much like a real computer
    that connects to the Internet through a router. The "router", in this
    case, is the VirtualBox networking engine, which maps traffic from and to
    the virtual machine transparently. The disadvantage of NAT mode is that,
    much like a private network behind a router, the virtual machine is
    invisible and unreachable from the outside internet; you cannot run a
    server this way unless you set up port forwarding (described
    below).</para>

    <para>The network frames sent out by the guest operating system are
    received by VirtualBox's NAT engine, which extracts the TCP/IP data and
    resends it using the host operating system. To an application on the host,
    or to another computer on the same network as the host, it looks like the
    data was sent by the VirtualBox application on the host, using an IP
    address belonging to the host. VirtualBox listens for replies to the
    packages sent, and repacks and resends them to the guest machine on its
    private network.</para>

    <para>The virtual machine receives its network address and configuration
    on the private network from a DHCP server integrated into VirtualBox. The
    IP address thus assigned to the virtual machine is usually on a completely
    different network than the host. As more than one card of a virtual
    machine can be set up to use NAT, the first card is connected to the
    private network 10.0.2.0, the second card to the network 10.0.3.0 and so
    on. If you need to change the guest-assigned IP range for some reason,
    please refer to <xref linkend="changenat" />.</para>

    <sect2 id="natforward">
      <title>Configuring port forwarding with NAT</title>

      <para>As the virtual machine is connected to a private network internal
      to VirtualBox and invisible to the host, network services on the guest
      are not accessible to the host machine or to other computers on the same
      network. However, like a physical router, VirtualBox can make selected
      services available to the world outside the guest through <emphasis
      role="bold">port forwarding.</emphasis> This means that VirtualBox
      listens to certain ports on the host and resends all packets which
      arrive there to the guest, on the same or a different port.</para>

      <para>To an application on the host or other physical (or virtual)
      machines on the network, it looks as though the service being proxied is
      actually running on the host. This also means that you cannot run the
      same service on the same ports on the host. However, you still gain the
      advantages of running the service in a virtual machine -- for example,
      services on the host machine or on other virtual machines cannot be
      compromised or crashed by a vulnerability or a bug in the service, and
      the service can run in a different operating system than the host
      system.</para>

      <para>You can set up a guest service which you wish to proxy using the
      command line tool <computeroutput>VBoxManage</computeroutput>; for
      details, please refer to <xref linkend="vboxmanage-modifyvm" />.</para>

      <para>You will need to know which ports on the guest the service uses
      and to decide which ports to use on the host (often but not always you
      will want to use the same ports on the guest and on the host). You can
      use any ports on the host which are not already in use by a service. For
      example, to set up incoming NAT connections to an
      <computeroutput>ssh</computeroutput> server in the guest, use the
      following command: <screen>VBoxManage modifyvm "VM name" --natpf1 "guestssh,tcp,,2222,,22"</screen>With
      the above example, all TCP traffic arriving on port 2222 on any host
      interface will be forwarded to port 22 in the guest. The protocol name
      <computeroutput>tcp</computeroutput> is a mandatory attribute defining
      which protocol should be used for forwarding
      (<computeroutput>udp</computeroutput> could also be used). The name
      <computeroutput>guestssh</computeroutput> is purely descriptive and will
      be auto-generated if omitted. The number after
      <computeroutput>--natpf</computeroutput> denotes the network card, like
      in other parts of VBoxManage.</para>

      <para>To remove this forwarding rule again, use the following command:
      <screen>VBoxManage modifyvm "VM name" --natpf1 delete "guestssh"</screen></para>

      <para>If for some reason the guest uses a static assigned IP address not
      leased from the built-in DHCP server, it is required to specify the
      guest IP when registering the forwarding rule: <screen>VBoxManage modifyvm "VM name" --natpf1 "guestssh,tcp,,2222,10.0.2.19,22"</screen>This
      example is identical to the previous one, except that the NAT engine is
      being told that the guest can be found at the 10.0.2.19 address.</para>

      <para>To forward <emphasis>all</emphasis> incoming traffic from a
      specific host interface to the guest, specify the IP of that host
      interface like this:<screen>VBoxManage modifyvm "VM name" --natpf1 "guestssh,tcp,127.0.0.1,2222,,22"</screen>This
      forwards all TCP traffic arriving on the localhost interface (127.0.0.1)
      via port 2222 to port 22 in the guest.</para>

      <para>It is not possible to configure incoming NAT connections while the
      VM is running. However, you can change the settings for a VM which is
      currently saved (or powered off at a snapshot).</para>
    </sect2>

    <sect2 id="nat-tftp">
      <title>PXE booting with NAT</title>

      <para>PXE booting is now supported in NAT mode. The NAT DHCP server
      provides a boot file name of the form
      <computeroutput>vmname.pxe</computeroutput> if the directory
      <computeroutput>TFTP</computeroutput> exists in the directory where the
      user's <computeroutput>VirtualBox.xml</computeroutput> file is kept. It
      is the responsibility of the user to provide
      <computeroutput>vmname.pxe</computeroutput>.</para>
    </sect2>

    <sect2 id="nat-limitations">
      <title>NAT limitations</title>

      <para>There are four <emphasis role="bold">limitations</emphasis> of NAT
      mode which users should be aware of:</para>

      <glosslist>
        <glossentry>
          <glossterm>ICMP protocol limitations:</glossterm>

          <glossdef>
            <para>Some frequently used network debugging tools (e.g.
            <computeroutput>ping</computeroutput> or tracerouting) rely on the
            ICMP protocol for sending/receiving messages. While ICMP support
            has been improved with VirtualBox 2.1
            (<computeroutput>ping</computeroutput> should now work), some
            other tools may not work reliably.</para>
          </glossdef>
        </glossentry>

        <glossentry>
          <glossterm>Receiving of UDP broadcasts is not reliable:</glossterm>

          <glossdef>
            <para>The guest does not reliably receive broadcasts, since, in
            order to save resources, it only listens for a certain amount of
            time after the guest has sent UDP data on a particular port. As a
            consequence, NetBios name resolution based on broadcasts does not
            always work (but WINS always works). As a workaround, you can use
            the numeric IP of the desired server in the
            <computeroutput>\\server\share</computeroutput> notation.</para>
          </glossdef>
        </glossentry>

        <glossentry>
          <glossterm>Protocols such as GRE are unsupported:</glossterm>

          <glossdef>
            <para>Protocols other than TCP and UDP are not supported. This
            means some VPN products (e.g. PPTP from Microsoft) cannot be used.
            There are other VPN products which use simply TCP and UDP.</para>
          </glossdef>
        </glossentry>

        <glossentry>
          <glossterm>Forwarding host ports &lt; 1024 impossible:</glossterm>

          <glossdef>
            <para>On Unix-based hosts (e.g. Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X) it is
            not possible to bind to ports below 1024 from applications that
            are not run by <computeroutput>root</computeroutput>. As a result,
            if you try to configure such a port forwarding, the VM will refuse
            to start.</para>
          </glossdef>
        </glossentry>
      </glosslist>

      <para>These limitations normally don't affect standard network use. But
      the presence of NAT has also subtle effects that may interfere with
      protocols that are normally working. One example is NFS, where the
      server is often configured to refuse connections from non-privileged
      ports (i.e. ports not below 1024).</para>
    </sect2>
  </sect1>

  <sect1>
    <title id="network_bridged">Bridged networking</title>

    <para>With bridged networking, VirtualBox uses a device driver on your
    <emphasis>host</emphasis> system that filters data from your physical
    network adapter. This driver is therefore called a "net filter" driver.
    This allows VirtualBox to intercept data from the physical network and
    inject data into it, effectively creating a new network interface in
    software. When a guest is using such a new software interface, it looks to
    the host system as though the guest were physically connected to the
    interface using a network cable: the host can send data to the guest
    through that interface and receive data from it. This means that you can
    set up routing or bridging between the guest and the rest of your
    network.</para>

    <para>For this to work, VirtualBox needs a device driver on your host
    system. The way bridged networking works has been completely rewritten
    with VirtualBox 2.0 and 2.1, depending on the host operating system. From
    the user perspective, the main difference is that complex configuration is
    no longer necessary on any of the supported host operating
    systems.<footnote>
        <para>For Mac OS X and Solaris hosts, net filter drivers were already
        added in VirtualBox 2.0 (as initial support for Host Interface
        Networking on these platforms). With VirtualBox 2.1, net filter
        drivers were also added for the Windows and Linux hosts, replacing the
        mechanisms previously present in VirtualBox for those platforms;
        especially on Linux, the earlier method required creating TAP
        interfaces and bridges, which was complex and varied from one
        distribution to the next. None of this is necessary anymore. Bridged
        network was formerly called "Host Interface Networking" and has been
        renamed with version 2.2 without any change in functionality.</para>
      </footnote></para>

    <para><note>
        <para>Even though TAP is no longer necessary on Linux with bridged
        networking, you <emphasis>can</emphasis> still use TAP interfaces for
        certain advanced setups, since you can connect a VM to any host
        interface -- which could also be a TAP interface.</para>
      </note>To enable bridged networking, all you need to do is to open the
    Settings dialog of a virtual machine, go to the "Network" page and select
    "Bridged network" in the drop down list for the "Attached to" field.
    Finally, select desired host interface from the list at the bottom of the
    page, which contains the physical network interfaces of your systems. On a
    typical MacBook, for example, this will allow you to select between "en1:
    AirPort" (which is the wireless interface) and "en0: Ethernet", which
    represents the interface with a network cable.</para>

    <para>Depending on your host operating system, the following limitations
    should be kept in mind:<itemizedlist>
        <listitem>
          <para>On <emphasis role="bold">Macintosh</emphasis> hosts,
          functionality is limited when using AirPort (the Mac's wireless
          networking) for bridged networking. Currently, VirtualBox supports
          only IPv4 over AirPort. For other protocols such as IPv6 and IPX,
          you must choose a wired interface.</para>
        </listitem>

        <listitem>
          <para>On <emphasis role="bold">Linux</emphasis> hosts, functionality
          is limited when using wireless interfaces for bridged networking.
          Currently, VirtualBox supports only IPv4 over wireless. For other
          protocols such as IPv6 and IPX, you must choose a wired
          interface.</para>

          <para>Also, setting the MTU to less than 1500 bytes on wired
          interfaces provided by the sky2 driver on the Marvell Yukon II EC
          Ultra Ethernet NIC is known to cause packet losses under certain
          conditions.</para>
        </listitem>

        <listitem>
          <para>On <emphasis role="bold">Solaris</emphasis> hosts, there is no
          support for using wireless interfaces. Filtering guest traffic using
          IPFilter is also not completely supported due to technical
          restrictions of the Solaris networking subsystem. These issues would
          be addressed in a future release of OpenSolaris.</para>

          <para>With VirtualBox 2.0.4 and above, it is possible to use
          Crossbow Virtual Network Interfaces (VNICs) with bridged networking,
          but with the following caveats:</para>

          <itemizedlist>
            <listitem>
              <para>A VNIC cannot be shared between multiple guest network
              interfaces, i.e. each guest network interface must have its own,
              exclusive VNIC.</para>
            </listitem>

            <listitem>
              <para>The VNIC and the guest network interface that uses the
              VNIC must be assigned identical MAC addresses.</para>
            </listitem>
          </itemizedlist>

          <para>When using VLAN interfaces with VirtualBox, they must be named
          according to the PPA-hack naming scheme (e.g. "e1000g513001"), as
          otherwise the guest may receive packets in an unexpected
          format.</para>
        </listitem>
      </itemizedlist></para>
  </sect1>

  <sect1 id="network_internal">
    <title>Internal networking</title>

    <para>Internal Networking is similar to bridged networking in that the VM
    can directly communicate with the outside world. However, the "outside
    world" is limited to other VMs which connect to the same internal
    network.</para>

    <para>Even though technically, everything that can be done using internal
    networking can also be done using bridged networking, there are two good
    reasons why this additional mode was implemented:<orderedlist>
        <listitem>
          <para><emphasis role="bold">Security.</emphasis> In bridged
          networking mode, all traffic goes through a physical interface of
          the host system. It is therefore possible to attach a packet sniffer
          (such as Wireshark) to the host interface and log all traffic that
          goes over it. If, for any reason, you prefer two or more VMs on the
          same machine to communicate privately, hiding their data from both
          the host system and the user, bridged networking therefore is not an
          option.</para>
        </listitem>

        <listitem>
          <para><emphasis role="bold">Speed.</emphasis> Internal networking is
          more efficient than bridged networking, as VirtualBox can directly
          transmit the data without having to send it through the host
          operating system's networking stack.</para>
        </listitem>
      </orderedlist></para>

    <para>Internal networks are created automatically as needed, i.e. there is
    no central configuration. Every internal network is identified simply by
    its name. Once there is more than one active virtual network card with the
    same internal network ID, the VirtualBox support driver will automatically
    "wire" the cards and act as a network switch. The VirtualBox support
    driver implements a complete Ethernet switch and supports both
    broadcast/multicast frames and promiscuous mode.</para>

    <para>In order to attach a VM's network card to an internal network, set
    its networking mode to "internal networking". There are two ways to
    accomplish this:</para>

    <para><itemizedlist>
        <listitem>
          <para>You can use a VM's "Settings" dialog in the VirtualBox
          graphical user interface. In the "Networking" category of the
          settings dialog, select "Internal Networking" from the drop-down
          list of networking modes. Now select the name of an existing
          internal network from the drop-down below or enter a new name into
          the entry field.</para>
        </listitem>

        <listitem>
          <para>You can use <screen>VBoxManage modifyvm "VM name" --nic&lt;x&gt; intnet</screen>
          Optionally, you can specify a network name with the command <screen>VBoxManage modifyvm "VM name" --intnet&lt;x&gt; "network name"</screen>
          If you do not specify a network name, the network card will be
          attached to the network <computeroutput>intnet</computeroutput> by
          default.</para>
        </listitem>
      </itemizedlist></para>

    <para>Unless you configure the (virtual) network cards in the guest
    operating systems that are participating in the internal network to use
    static IP addresses, you may want to use the DHCP server that is built
    into VirtualBox to manage IP addresses for the internal network. Please
    see <xref linkend="vboxmanage-dhcpserver" /> for details.</para>

    <para>As a security measure, the Linux implementation of internal
    networking only allows VMs running under the same user ID to establish an
    internal network.</para>
  </sect1>

  <sect1 id="network_hostonly">
    <title>Host-only networking</title>

    <para>Host-only networking is another networking mode that was added with
    version 2.2 of VirtualBox. It can be thought of as a hybrid between the
    bridged and internal networking modes: as with bridged networking, the
    virtual machines can talk to each other and the host as if they were
    connected through a physical ethernet switch. Similarly, as with internal
    networking however, a physical networking interface need not be present,
    and the virtual machines cannot talk to the world outside the host since
    they are not connected to a physical networking interface.</para>

    <para>Instead, when host-only networking is used, VirtualBox creates a new
    software interface on the host which then appears next to your existing
    network interfaces. In other words, whereas with bridged networking an
    existing physical interface is used to attach virtual machines to, with
    host-only networking a new "loopback" interface is created on the host.
    And whereas with internal networking, the traffic between the virtual
    machines cannot be seen, the traffic on the "loopback" interface on the
    host can be intercepted.</para>

    <para>Host-only networking is particularly useful for preconfigured
    virtual appliances, where multiple virtual machines are shipped together
    and designed to cooperate. For example, one virtual machine may contain a
    web server and a second one a database, and since they are intended to
    talk to each other, the appliance can instruct VirtualBox to set up a
    host-only network for the two. A second (bridged) network would then
    connect the web server to the outside world to serve data to, but the
    outside world cannot connect to the database.</para>

    <para>To change a virtual machine's virtual network interface to "host
    only" mode:<itemizedlist>
        <listitem>
          <para>either go to the "Network" page in the virtual machine's
          settings notebook in the graphical user interface and select
          "Host-only networking", or</para>
        </listitem>

        <listitem>
          <para>on the command line, type <computeroutput>VBoxManage modifyvm
          "VM name" --nic&lt;x&gt; hostonly</computeroutput>; see <xref
          linkend="vboxmanage-modifyvm" /> for details.</para>
        </listitem>
      </itemizedlist></para>

    <para>For host-only networking, like with internal networking, you may
    find the DHCP server useful that is built into VirtualBox. This can be
    enabled to then manage the IP addresses in the host-only network since
    otherwise you would need to configure all IP addresses
    statically.<itemizedlist>
        <listitem>
          <para>In the VirtualBox graphical user interface, you can configure
          all these items in the global settings via "File" -&gt; "Settings"
          -&gt; "Network", which lists all host-only networks which are
          presently in use. Click on the network name and then on the "Edit"
          button to the right, and you can modify the adapter and DHCP
          settings.</para>
        </listitem>

        <listitem>
          <para>Alternatively, you can use <computeroutput>VBoxManage
          dhcpserver</computeroutput> on the command line; please see <xref
          linkend="vboxmanage-dhcpserver" /> for details.</para>
        </listitem>
      </itemizedlist></para>
  </sect1>
</chapter>