Setting up NAT and port forwarding to connect to a VirtualBox virtual machine for LAMP development

I recently got a new MacBook Pro laptop (awesome!) and went through my usual rigmarole of setting up a new [VirtualBox] virtual machine for LAMP development. In previous situations I used bridged network connections which allow my virtual machine to have its own network connection, and acquire an IP address via DHCP. Now that I plan on being more mobile, I was concerned about having a static IP address for my virtual machine (for samba connections, scripting, and any other processes that relies on a static IP address). I decided to explore alternative virtual network connections and changed my virtual NIC to use NAT (the default network connection for VirtualBox). This configuration establishes a virtual NAT for your virtual machines which is great, but the downside is I know have to setup port forwarding to connect to my virtual machine. In bridged network configurations, I could simply SSH or use Samba to connect to my virtual machine by IP address. With NAT I have to setup port forwarding for the services I need to connect to. Initially I decided to setup port forwarding for SSH (port 22) and HTTP (port 80). While my virtual machine was powered down, I executed the following commands. NOTE: you'll have to replace "Centos" with the name of your virtual machine.

Now, I can SSH to my virtual machine..

Or, connect to Apache by browsing to http://localhost:8080

The benefit of this network configuration allows me to travel anywhere with my laptop, use any type of network connection, and not have to worry about changing the way I connect to my virtual machine for development.