Posted on 12/06/2012. By Pete Otaqui.
I have an OS X host computer, running an Ubuntu guest, and I found that the guest could not create symlinks in a shared folder.
All the permissions were fine, I could create, modify and delete files and directories in the shared folder from the guest, and existing symlinks worked as expected, but I could not create any new symlinks.
It seems that this behaviour was intentionally introduced as a security measure to stop guests being able to create symlinks outside of the shared folder area.
Trac ticket 10085 on the VirtualBox has some good information, but here is the fix (which you need to run from the host machine):
VBoxManage setextradata GUEST_NAME VBoxInternal2/SharedFoldersEnableSymlinksCreate/SHARE_NAME 1