ODI Agent and NAT on VirtualBox

I have been trying to get my ODI installation on a OEL 6.5 virtual machine to work properly. As I described in my previous post I have the following configuration:

• Windows 7 Enterprise Edition host machine
• Virtualbox 4.3.12
• Oracle Enterprise Linux 6.4 guest in VM
• Oracle database 11.2.0.4
• Oracle Warehouse Builder 11.2.0.4
• Oracle Data Integrator 12.1.3

I usually set up networking with NAT with port forwarding. This means the port on the VM is forwarded to a port on the host (in general I use the same ports when possible) and I can access a service on the virtual machine via localhost:<port>. For instance: http://lolcahost:8080/apex for an apex server.

However when I try to access an ODI agent on port 20910 with the port forwarded to the host machine it does not seem to work. I can start the agent and it responds to calls originating from the guest, but not to requests from the host. I can get it to work by fiddling with the listening address for the odi agent, but then scheduling does not want to work.

In the end I have resigned to the fact that I will have to create a virtual machine with a static IP address and Host-Only networking instead of NAT. I have noticed however that the Host name in the agent configuration has to be fully qualified (including domain), even if the shorthand name has been included in the hosts file.