Each of the four networking adapters can be separately configured to operate in one of the following four modes:

By default, virtual network cards are set up to use network address translation, which is well suited to standard networking needs (accessing the Internet from programs running in the guest and providing network services for machines in a local intranet). In particular, if all you want is to browse the Web, download files and view e-mail inside the guest, then the default configuration of the NAT network should be sufficient for you, and you can safely skip the rest of this section. Please note that the ping utility does not work over NAT, and that there are certain limitations when using Windows file sharing (see Sectioná6.4.3, “NAT limitations” for details).

For advanced networking needs such as network simulations, host interface networking can be used to set up an additional, software based network interface on the host to which the virtual machine is connected. Finally, VirtualBox internal networking can be used to create a virtual network which is visible to selected virtual machines, but not to applications running on the host or to the outside world. The following sections describe the available network modes in more detail.