VirtualBox, Remote Desktop, and VPN

remote desktopvirtual machinevirtualboxvpn

Networking is not a strong skill set of mine and I'm new to VirtualBox..so here we go –

I've got a Windows (XP) VM running on VirtualBox. I am able to use remote desktop to connect to the VM with no problems.

The Problem: I need to connect to another network via VPN on the virtual machine. However, once connected, all local network resources become unavailable. As a result, my remote desktop session is disconnected.

Question: Is there another way to remotely access the VM? Is there some way that VirtualBox can route me to the VM without using the Windows RDC functionality so that I can have an active VPN connection but still control the VM remotely.

Best Answer

Should have done some more research. This feature is already built into VirtualBox. You can log into the VM through the host machine.

All you have to do is turn on remote display in the settings for the VM and choose the port that you want to use (make sure to make appropriate firewall changes). Then you remote to that port on the host machine.

Ex: Host machine has an IP of 192.168.1.200 and you set up port 3395 for the remote display - you would open Remote Desktop Connection and use 192.168.1.200:3395 and it would open the VM.

More detail from the VirtualBox site. http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch07.html

Related Solutions

Windows – Remote Access to VirtualBox with Remote Display enabled: Multiple issues with Windows remote desktop client

To get Windows Remote Desktop Client (certainly the version included with Windows 7, haven't tested others) to connect to VirtualBox VRDP sessions, you need to tick the "Allow me to save credentials" box in the Options drop-down, then connect as normal.

You don't necessarily have to save the credentials, you just need to have that box ticked. I'm not sure if it's something to do with how the VRDP server reads the connection info or something to do with how MSTSC sends it.

For your issue #2, it sounds like a bandwidth issue. Click the "Display" tab and choose a lower resolution and lower colour depth. You can also click the "Experience" tab and play with those settings. Do they make any difference? Are you connecting over a LAN or over the Internet?

How to resize a VirtualBox vmdk file

If you want to end having back a vmdk hard disk (maybe you are interested in using the disk in vwmare too), the complete steps are:

VBoxManage clonemedium "source.vmdk" "cloned.vdi" --format vdi
VBoxManage modifymedium "cloned.vdi" --resize 51200
VBoxManage clonemedium "cloned.vdi" "resized.vmdk" --format vmdk

The above will resize the hard disk up to 50GB (50 * 1024MB).

To complete things you need to resize the drive too! To achieve this, you might want to download gparted iso and boot from that iso to resize your drive (select the iso from within the virtualbox settings).

P.S. If your new size is too small, you'll get the same error even with your new vdi file.