We should keep in mind that capturing directly on a system is error-prone, because it might considerably differ from what’s actually on the wire. Please note that for the sake of clarification I’m using Wireshark to capture packets on the host and the VMs. In the following I will discuss some of the details you should consider when building up your lab – from a security and from a functionality standpoint – so that you can decide on scheme that is right for you. For example, if you want to perform local testing, if you want to capture packets, if you want to provide services to the network, etc. At the end of the day it depends on what you want to achieve. There is not “the best” scheme for your VM. Let’s see which options you can choose from in VirtualBox: The networking scheme also has security implications, because if you are running an old and vulnerable operating system for local testing (or something like Metasploitable) you might not want it to be reachable from anywhere outside your computer. This will have an impact on the functionality of the VM, for example: Will the VM have access to the internet or not, will it be reachable for other systems in the network or even the internet, will it be able to communicate with other VMs on that computer, will the host computer itself be able to communicate with the VM, etc. When you set up a new VM, you need to decide on the networking scheme. Many people will know VMware Player/Workstation as hypervisor solution to host virtual machines, but some special features aside, I think VirtualBox is on par and moreover it is free and open source.

Therefore I wanted to quickly explain the different networking schemes available in VirtualBox and how they work. I see that especially people who are new to working with virtual labs have questions on why their network is not working, why their VMs sometimes have internet access and sometimes not, or why their host system cannot see traffic from the hosted VMs ( Virtual Machines).

Nevertheless, when setting up such a lab, you should take care to properly set the networking scheme according to your needs.

Nowadays this is a piece of cake, because thanks to virtualization you can run a whole network of computers virtually on your single one laptop. People in IT security will most likely need to work and test with different operating systems, versions and software.

Oracle virtualbox internal network