What is Oracle VirtualBox?

The Oracle VM VirtualBox is a free, open source application, which act as a hypervisor and allows the users to create and run multiple OS (operating system) on their PC or Mac machines. It is a perfect tool for you to learn and practice installation and configurations of different operating systems.

However, some of the users may have problem and struggled of how SSH (Secure Shell) from their local machine to the Guest OS on the VirtualBox. In this tutorial, we will show you how you can SSH into your VirtualBox machine of any OS in just a few steps. In the demonstration, we will use CentOS 7 as an example.

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For the CentOS installation files, you may download from:
https://www.centos.org/download/

For Oracle VirualBox source. you may download from:
https://www.virtualbox.org/

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How to SSH into VirtualBox machine?

First of all, we assumed that you have already installed the VirtualBox on your desktop PC or Mac. Now, just launch VirtualBox. On your target guestOS, right click and select "Setting".



On the "Setting" window, select "Network". For "Adapter 1", make sure it is enabled and attached to: NAT



Next, open the "Advanced" option. Just leave other setting as default, and then click: "Port Forwarding"





On the "Port Forwarding Rules" window, click the + icon on the top right hand corner to add a new rule of port forwarding. For example, the rule parameters could be:

Name: ssh
Protocol: TCP
Host Port: 3022
Guest Port: 22

You may just leave other fields empty. The configutation should be like:



You have bascially completed your port forwarding setting. Just start your guest machine and test now. Now, back to your host macine. You can easily connect to your guest OS with the following command:



You can also use any deskop terminal to connect, such as putty:



The connect should be successful.

Conclusion

This tutorial explains how to connect to your VirtualBox guest OS with SSH. The steps are straightforward and easy to complete. Hopes you enjoy it!