Virtualbox Support 8 NICs for VM Guest

Virtualbox supports up to eight network cards. If you look into the *.vbox you will see that there are already preconfigured but disabled. Unfortunately inside the VBox GUI we could only configure up to four. I will show how to get and configure the other.
You have to use VBoxManage to get the other network cards. After the option will always be the NIC Number count one to eight. Here I will use five and the name of the machine that will be configured is “SFS1”.

Set Mode and enable NIC

When a Mode is set the NIC will be enabled.

C:\Program Files\Oracle VM VirtualBox>VBoxManage.exe

1. Set NIC five to Host-Only Mode and User vboxnet0 (Initially existing Host-Only Net)

   VBoxManage modifyvm SFS1 --nic5 hostonly
   VBoxManage modifyvm SFS1 --hostonlyadapter5 "vboxnet0"

2. Set NIC five to Bridge "Intel(R) 82567LM Gigabit Network Connection"

   VBoxManage modifyvm SFS1 --nic5 bridged
   VBoxManage modifyvm SFS1 --bridgeadapter5 "Intel(R) 82567LM Gigabit Network Connection"

3. Set NIC to NAT Mode

   VBoxManage modifyvm SFS1 --nic5 nat

4. Use the internal VM net “test01”

   VBoxManage modifyvm SFS1 --nic5 intnet
   VBoxManage modifyvm SFS1 --intnet5 "test01"

Configuring NIC

• To use VLAN and some other things in VMs the Promiscuous mode have to be enabled

  VBoxManage modifyvm SFS1 --nicpromisc5 allow-all

• Use other hardware type (Intel Pro/1000 MT Server)

  VBoxManage modifyvm SFS1 --nictype5 82545EM

• Dis/connect cable

  VBoxManage modifyvm SFS1 --cableconnected5 off 

  VBoxManage modifyvm SFS1 --cableconnected5 on