If you’re using NAT on your virtual machines, you can make the guest O/S services accessible from the host O/S by doing port forwarding. Obviously, this means that the guest O/S can be accessed by anything on the network which may be good or bad depending on your environment.
Anyway, here’s the excerpt from the VirtualBox [...]
There are, apparently, two ways to create a clone of the Virtualbox drives. The ‘right’ way and the ‘wrong’ way.
The right way is to use the following:
VBoxManage clonehd <filename> <outputfile>
You can optionally use the UUID as the input filename.
Anyway, the ‘wrong’ way to do it is to make a copy of the .vdi file in [...]