Network between host OS (18.04) and guest (*nix) in VirtualBox

Tried setting up a network and running on a VM, but ran into some difficulties that I couldn't solve.

The host OS Ubuntu is 18.04, the guest OS is a nix based OS, I can include and load the necessary drivers, e.g. virtio, vmxnet3, e1000and anything else.

If I compile a guest OS VM with vmxnet3drivers loaded and run it on VMware Player(NAT network) , the network works fine and I can transfer files between host and guest OS using scp etc. Output on guest OS ifconfig:

If I compile the guest OS VM, load the virtiodriver and run it VirtualBox(with NAT networking again) , for some reason I can't get the network up and running. Output ifconfigon guest OS :

What I noticed of course is that there is no (ivp4) IP assigned to the vt0interface in VirtualBox . I can of course run it, ifconfig vt0 xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx netmask 255.255.255.0but I'm not sure if this solves the problem, at least it doesn't work when trying to ssh/scp to the VM.

I checked that the host PC (IP for MTU 1500, vs. 172.16.129.1 in the guest OS) has port 22 open;

sudo nmap -sS -p- 172.16.129.1

Starting Nmap 7.60 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2018-06-19 10:47 CEST
Nmap scan report for linux (172.16.129.1)
Host is up (0.000013s latency).
Not shown: 65532 closed ports
PORT     STATE SERVICE
22/tcp   open  ssh
902/tcp  open  iss-realsecure
1716/tcp open  xmsg

So basically, the only difference between these two virtual machines, apart from the obvious difference in the software used (VMware vs VirtualBox), is the drivers loaded for each virtual machine. The rest of the code used to compile the guest OS VM is exactly the same without any changes, so I'm confused.

I've also tried using the driver e1000and selecting an Intel NIC driver in VirtualBox, but that doesn't work either - the closest I've gotten in VirtualBox so far is to use that .virtio

Does anyone have any suggestions on what I could try, or know what I might be overlooking here? For example, is there a driver for vmxnet3VirtualBox ?

I could of course settle for a VMware solution, but I prefer to use VirtualBox because that's the other way I'm using it - I just tested VMware now to see if it works there.