VMWare Fusion Networking Concepts

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• VMWare Fusion Concepts

Network Topology

VMware Fusion offers by default two choices of subnets:

1. vmnet8 - a 172.16.153.0/24 host-based network with a DHCP server and external NAT access. Note that different Fusion versions come pre-configurated with different IP addresses (172.16.153.0, 172.16.130.0).
2. vmnet1 - a 192.168.10.1/24 internal host-based network with a DHCP server, without external NAT access.

Both subnets allow guests to be directly routed into from the host processes.

In both subnets, guests are dynamically configured with DHCP by default, but they can also be statically configured.

For vmnet8 the static configuration range is 172.16.153.3 - 172.16.153.127 (172.16.153.1 is the host interface, and 172.16.153.2 is the NAT server). The DHCP range configuration can be found in /Library/Preferences/VMware Fusion/vmnet8/dhcpd.conf. The guests have external access via a NAT server, so they can access the host's gateway.

For vmnet1 the static configuration range is 192.168.10.2 - 192.168.10.127 (192.168.10.1 is the host interface).

Gateway

The guests, even those configured with static IP addresses, get unroutable addresses, so if we want a guest to be able to establish connections with external servers, we need to configure it with the IP of the gateway that performs the NAT translation. This is not 172.16.153.1, but 172.16.153.2.

Configuration

For details on configuration see

VMware Fusion Networking Configuration

Networking CLI Tool

/Applications/VMware Fusion.app/Contents/Library/vmnet-cli