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This morning I decided I didn’t want my large Windows desktop machine cluttering up my under-desk space any longer.
Having asked for recommendations on Twitter for the best virtual machine solutions, @magicaltrout and @tenatiousb both recommended Oracle’s VirtualBox which I swiftly downloaded and installed.
Half an hour later I had Windows 7 installed and everything seemed fine. The only reason I have a use for a Windows machine is that it is the required platform for the remote support software I use and my accounts software. Setting up the accounts package was fine, but I had a little more difficulty in setting up ScreenConnect, as it required portforwarding from my router via our static IP address to function.
After a bit of fiddling around I worked out the solution:
- Setup your virtual machine in VirtualBox as usual
- Go to the machine’s settings menu and select ‘Network’
- Under ‘Attached To:’ select ‘Bridged Adapter’. This will give your virtual machine a standard IP address on your network (something like 192.168.0.xxx)
- Make sure your port forwarding and/or static IP address and MAC address is setup correctly in your router to reflect the IP of the virtual machine, not the host machine.