I have been playing around Oracle 11g and Microsoft SQL Express inside of virtual machines. I wanted to be able host these databases to other computers in my LAN which meant the virtual machines needed an IP address on my subnet. I am using VirtualBox to host the virtual machines and unfortunately bridged networking (needed to make this work) is not setup when you install VirtualBox. However I found this walkthrough and I worked really well.
The guide is written for VirtualBox 1.6.2 but it worked fine for me in version 2.0.4.
http://samiux.wordpress.com/2008/07/30/bridging-virtualbox-162-on-ubuntu-8041/
For quick reference the basic steps are:
Install bridging utilities:
sudo apt-get install uml-utilities bridge-utils
Change the permissions of this file so others can access it:
sudo chmod 0666 /dev/net/tun
Add the bridge to the networking configuration (you can give the bridge device a static IP if need be):
sudo vim /etc/network/interfaces
auto br0
iface br0 inet dhcp
bridge_ports eth0
bridge_fd 9
bridge_hello 2
bridge_maxage 12
bridge_stp off
Restart networking:
sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart
Add a virtual network device to the bridge:
sudo VBoxAddIF vbox0 `whoami` br0
Then you can in and assign the virtual machines networking configuration to Host Interface: vbox0. Something to note is that only one virtual network interface can be used at a time. So if you want two virtual machines to run at the same time using the bridge, you have to create additional ones (sudo VBoxAddIF vbox1 `whoami` br0, etc) and assign them to machines accordingly.
I finally got my big desktop computer organized and rebuilt to the latest version of Ubuntu. The computer has two 500GB SATA drives on it, so I also put Sun’s Virtualbox on it and am now downloading Open Source operating systems like crazy. I have already got two Linux distributions and one Unix installed and about five or so more downloaded.
I want to get back into trying out all kinds of distributions again because for about the past year I have stopped hopping from one distribution to the other and settled on Ubuntu. So I am a bit out of touch on non-Debian based operating systems.
I have been taking some notes on my experience installing and playing with these systems and I will post my thoughts here as I get time.
I have been setting up Xen based virtualization and I just wanted to post the useful links I have found. Unfortunately (at the time of this writing) there are couple of bugs in the Ubuntu repositories for Xen that can make installing and configuring Xen a bit of a headache.
This article on HowtoForge pretty much gives you everything your need to get going (even how to get around the current bugs).
http://www.howtoforge.com/ubuntu-8.04-server-install-xen-from-ubuntu-repositories
This is the user manual for Xen. Unfortunately it is not very descriptive in places, but it is still a good resource.
http://tx.downloads.xensource.com/downloads/docs/user
This is the manual page for xen-create-image. It has some really great examples to base your DomU creation commands from.
http://man.cx/xen-create-image
Below is the Ubuntu community documentation for Xen. They still need some time to update to Hardy.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Xen