VirtualBox Shared Folders with Windows Host

As I'm wrapping up the Cloud Networking course on coursera.org, I'm seeing a lot questions on week five's forums regarding how to transfer files from the guest VM(instructor provided image) to the host.

Turns out VirtualBox makes this pretty simple. Below I will briefly outline the steps on how to configure persistent shared folders on the instructor provided VM(Ubuntu 14.04 image).

1. Create a folder on your host's Desktop. This can be called anything, but for my case, and for the sake of bash, I named it "CloudNetMOOCShared":

2. Go the VM's settings panel(Ensure it's powered off):

3. Navigate to the "Shared Folders" pane.

4. Click on "Create new shared folder"

5. Click on the drop down arrow next to "Folder Path:"

6. Click on "Other..."

7. Now you should be able to select a folder on your workstation. Select the folder created in step #1:

8. Ensure "Auto-mount" is selected. This will tell the VirtualBox guest VM to try to automatically mount the shared folder on startup:

9. Hit "OK". Now your screen should look something like this. The shared folder entry should be populated with the respective file names: 

10. Start up the VM and open the terminal application. Next, you will use the "mount" command to see all of your mounted folders across the entire guest.

11. On my machine, the mounted folder, with it's corresponding mount point, is listed at the very bottom of the command's output. The first column("CloudNetMOOCShared") is the folder that we mounted, the third column("/media/sf_CloudNetMOOCShared") is the mount point.

12. Because permissions haven't been set up for the mooc user to access the mount point, there is no way I can view the directory. For brevity, I simply switched to the root user using the command "sudo -i", then changed to the mount point directory. The root user has full access to the file system.

I also created a file called "text.txt" to see if it would also appear on my host:

13. There it is. This can be done to any file on the guest and vice-versa. 

That's all there is to it. To easily transfer a file from the guest to the host, simply copy the file to the "/media/sf_CloudNetMOOCShared" folder, and it will be available to the host.