Paul's Internet Landfill/ 2016/ Connecting to Virtualbox Virtual Machines via Hamachi

Connecting to VirtualBox Virtual Machines via Hamachi

Here is the setup: We have one workstation running Windows 7. This workstation has the Hamachi proprietary VPN software installed. Let's call this machine win7-host.

On this workstation we have VirtualBox and one Windows 7 virtual machine guest. This guest machine is intended for incoming RDP connections; it should behave exactly like any other machine on the network, except that it does not exist physically. Let's call this machine win7-guest.

There are two situations where people might connect to win7-guest:

For local connectioms win7-guest should look just like any other computer, so I configured VirtualBox to use bridged networking. This works well. (It also works for people connecting into our network via site-to-site OpenVPN.)

What does not work well are remote connections via Hamachi. I installed Hamachi inside win7-guest and tried to join it to our (paid) network. The guest joins the network and can see a listing of other computers, but cannot connect in or out.

The following question on Super User provides much of the answer: http://superuser.com/questions/316275/accessing-a-virtual-machine-over-hamachi-vpn . The underlying problem is that both VirtualBox and Hamachi create TAP adapters for their networking, and they fight -- in particular, the Hamachi TAP adapter in win7-guest does not work with the VirtualBox TAP adapter.

I fiddled with a lot of different configurations until I stumbled across the following variation of the supplied answer:

Hamachi creates an IP address for each member of its network. Let's pretend that address for win7-host is 5.6.7.8. Then from another computer on the Hamachi network you can RDP to 5.6.7.8:3456 and access win7-guest via RDP.

This works because Hamachi is a full VPN program, and does not restrict you to RDP. Thus one person can be working on win7-host at the console or via RDP, and a second person can use RDP to connect to win7-guest without kicking the first person off.