What if you in a travel & hardly needs to get work in a networking situation? A virtual machine (VM) installed in your system can do that. This situation also affected when you only have 1 PC but you must have at least 2 PC to get work, just like me as I have a laptop but need 2nd PC in order to support my jobs. Rather than spending money to buying extra PC/laptop, I considered to using a VM over my laptop. It’s more valuable, practice & easy to carry as you will have 2 working PC in a single system. Think about it!

The needs of 2 PC’s using Windows XP – for example – can help a programmer to debug their windows client/server based application which using a networking utilization. Why I choose VirtualBox? It’s as simply as that it’s free, lightweight & robust. This article is my continued part of my first experience about (http://paparadit.blogspot.com/2007/05/virtualbox-another-open-source-virtual.html) VirtualBox behavior in DHCP server & (http://paparadit.blogspot.com/2007/07/qemu-virtual-machine-manager-part-iii.html) comparison between VirtualBox & QEMU. As seen on the title, I used both of Windows XP as the host & guest OS in an interoperability of networking (a static address LAN, indeed). I’m planning in the next session using Linux as the host OS. May this document brings more benefit.

First of all, download the latest VirtualBox application from the website. I used VirtualBox 1.4.0 to did this experience. Okay, let assumed that you have already a Windows XP system fresh installed as the guest OS. A good start on how to installing it you may find on my previous article. Now is the time to configure the networking in both systems. Open the VM settings, click on a Network session. On the Host Interface group box, click the green plus folder to create the virtual host interface network.

As automatically, the VM will create the default network adapter named by [b:1q1x6j6q]VirtualBox Host Interface 1 on the host OS.

Assign the IP address with a static one. For example, you may configured it with 192.168.1.1 & default subnet mask to 255.255.255.0. Note that this configuration becomes the host OS IP address. Next, press OK button to activating the changes.

Then, start the guest OS. For more resources, install the VBoxAddition library comes within VirtualBox setup. It would bring additional device driver e.g: configurable display adapter resolution & mouse integrating between hosts & guest OS.

Set the guest OS IP address with 192.168.1.11 & default subnet mask to 255.255.255.0. Note that this configuration becomes the guest OS IP address. Now, back to host OS, run DOS command from Start Menu :: Run & ping to the guest OS. It should now responding.

Make sure that the guest OS also brings the same reply with pinging to the host OS.

That’s the sign that your both host & guest systems are being operating well. Now, it’s up to you, whether you like to create a map network drive or something else to support your own jobs.

It’s done. Now you have fully 2 Windows systems runs with active networking right on a single computer.