Access VirtualBox SSH and Web Server

One of the thing that differs VirtualBox from Microsoft’s Virtual PC is that VB puts guest on a subnet of the computer that you are working on. This means that it cannot be directly accessed from other computers on your network.

To enable access, you need to configure your computer to allow ports to be forwarded to the guest. Thankfully, this is quite straightforward with the VBoxManage tool, and Allister Sanchez covers it well here: Additions and SSH Access to a VirtualBox Guest.
I’m assuming that your Vitual Machine is called MyVBoxSystem. Replace this with the name of your VM.

To enable SSH:

On the host computer, run the following commands:

VBoxManage setextradata MyVBoxSystem "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/ssh/HostPort" 22
VBoxManage setextradata MyVBoxSystem "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/ssh/GuestPort" 22
VBoxManage setextradata MyVBoxSystem "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/ssh/Protocol" TCP

This is essentially telling VirtualBox to map any access on port 22 (the host port) to 22 on the guest. On a Windows system, this is fine as you are unlikely to be running an ssh server. If you are though, just change the HostPort parameter to a port that you know is free.

To enable HTTP:

VBoxManage setextradata MyVBoxSystem "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/http/HostPort" 80
VBoxManage setextradata MyVBoxSystem "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/http/GuestPort" 80
VBoxManage setextradata MyVBoxSystem "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/http/Protocol" TCP

Once again, we’re passing TCP ports forward. If you already have a web server installed such as Apache or IIS, then you will probably need to change the HostPort to something like 8080.

Make sure that your VM isn’t running when you run these commands. To check that the settings are saved, you can run the following command:

VBoxManage getextradata MyVBoxSystem enumerate

Alternatively, open up the VM .xml file which is found in .VirtualBox/Machines/MyVBoxSystem/MyVBoxSystem.xml. The settings are found in the ExtraData node:

<ExtraDataItem name="VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/apache/HostPort" value="8080"/>
<ExtraDataItem name="VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/apache/GuestPort" value="80"/>
<ExtraDataItem name="VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/apache/Protocol" value="TCP"/>
<ExtraDataItem name="VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/ssh/HostPort" value="222"/>
<ExtraDataItem name="VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/ssh/GuestPort" value="22"/>
<ExtraDataItem name="VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/ssh/Protocol" value="TCP"/>

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