virtualization with multicast receive

Question

I need a virtualization solution with the following properties:

• guest OSes can receive multicast traffic from the host machine.
• some services running on the guest OS (eg: port 80) can be port forwarded, so it's visible on the host and other machines.

I tried vmware player, it doesn't support multicast at all.

I managed to set up port forwarding with Virtualbox, but multicast doesn't work seem to work.

Answer 1

If you can't use bridging mode for your virtual machine's NICs in your configuration, you might try setting up a separate private network and set up multicast routing between the pivate and the public network, presumably including NAT for outbound private traffic.

A possible solution might include host-only networking (this would give you a virtual NIC in your host operating system not connected to anything else but the virtual network) and the appropriate multicast routing / NAT setup at your VM host.

I don't think this is a good task for a Windows machine. If your Host must be Windows and you are not able to either get even a single further IP address for a Linux guest VM or a separate appliance performing this job or move the public IP address your host uses to the aforementioned Linux guest, you are probably stuck here.

Answer 2

Finally we managed to set it up with a mixed solution:

• One virtual network card was set up to BRIDGED mode so we can get multicast traffic.
• The other was set up to NAT so we can do port forwarding.