Infrastructure Software

I know this is somewhat off-topic, but I'm hoping there's some expertise here that will be a bit more helpful than when I asked this on the VirtualBox forums.

For a coupe of years now I've been running my own private test lab on my laptop, using VMworkstation. It's been working to my satisfaction, but with all the recommendations to use VirtualBox (after all, it's free) I thought I'd give it a try. This was a few months back, and I ran into a real problem with the way VB appears to handle networking vs. VMware.

With VMware, I set all my virtual machines to use NAT. This allows me to give the vm a fixed IP address, not reveal itself outside the host OS, and still reach the internet for things like yum updates. Obviousely, bridged network would allow me to access the inernet, but would make me have to play by the rules of whatever network I'm on -- my company or my home ISP. Host only would address that but not allow me to pull updates from the internet.

Now, with VirtualBox, I couldn't get NAT to work with a fixed IP address that I assigned to the vm. The guys at the VB forum couldn't seem to understand why that was an issue. They just kept saying to allow the vm to use a DHCP assigned address and 'everything just works'.

I don't have VB installed at the moment, so can't re-run tests, but thought I'd throw this out to see if it rings a bell with anyone, and if so if there might be a solution. I still tend to believe VB will do a fixed guest IP with NAT and I just wasn't seeing how to make it work, but perhaps not.

Comments?