Are two IP addresses necessary with VirtualBox and Bridged Networking?

Question

I have a CentOS 6 server with eight physical network adapters.

I want to run Windows Server 2008 R2 as a Guest OS in VirtualBox with a bridged network adapter. On my CentOS box eth2 (192.168.10.4) is the main network adapter. eth0 is the adapter I want to use for the bridged adapter for my first Guest OS.

In CentOS eth0 has an IP address of 192.168.10.17; my Guest OS has an IP of 192.168.10.10. There are no networking problems with this setup, everything works just fine. My problem is that I am using two IPs for a single Guest OS: 192.168.10.10 and 192.168.10.17.

Can I eliminate 192.168.10.17 on eth0 (by commenting out IPADDR in ifcfg-eth0), or are both IPs (on the host and guest) required?

Answer 1

If you only need the guest to have a valid IP address you can assign the host adapter a nonsense address of 0.0.0.0

The virtual OS should still interface with the rest of the network through its own IP