Having been used to VMPlayer for decades, I experimented with VirtualBox yesterday and spent quite a few hours trying to SSH into an instance, when in VMP it was a breeze. I understand from these answers that VBox needs port forwarding or alternatively use Bridged (which worked for sometime then broke connectivity on the guest after some time) - then I just gave up on VBox.Why this difference in implementation between the two ? Why does VMP require no port forwarding while VBox does ? Is it for better security ?Even cloning a VM was not as easy as it is with VMP (just copy the entire dir!)To elaborate:my guest IP: 192.168.124.153; host: (I am assuming 192.168.124.1 (Vmnet1) is the one - so it seems like it IS being bridged (I had earlier not looked at Vmnets, just my WLAN ip 192.168.0.x- my bad) - but it still begs the question - why does it work with the VMPlayer guest in NAT mode while the actual underlying connection looks bridged ? Is VMP doing something under the covers ?) - So when I changed to Bridged, the Guest IP address is now 192.160.0.22 (correctly) - and yes, I did restart after each N/w changeI guess I will accept the answer the NAT/Bridge setting is largely irrelevant if you're only communicating from the VM Host to one of its guests
When SSH'ing into a guest VM from within a host, why does VMPlayer allow SSH via NAT by default whereas Virtualbox requires configuration
linux;ssh
Your premise is faulty. Neither has to apply the networking in any particular way.VMware bridges by default (that's the VM Network) because it's a system geared towards people who run multiple VMs on a group of servers and (mostly) know exactly what they're doing with the network.VirtualBox NATs by default because it is geared towards people who run one (or so) server on a desktop PC and quite often know little or nothing about networking.I run a couple of VMs on VirtualBox that both NAT and bridge. (The bridge is on the host-only network so I can get to them trivially from my host. The NAT is so the servers have easy access to the Internet.)