VMware 6.0 on Vista with FC8 and XP Network

[omidkamangar]

Hi,
I have installed vmware 6.0 workstation on Vista Ultimate and installed Linux FC8 and Windows XP as two virtual machines on it.
I want to set the network connections on all 3 OSs to create a network with the Vista as the server and other 2 as clients.
Can anyone help me with that?
Thanks in advance.

[tzko]

Configure your virtual machines' network adapter as Bridge. I think it's a default configuration for all newly created virtual machines if you didn't change any configs when you creating a virtual machine using Wizard. You can do this in VMWare. Network setting of virtual machines should be in the IP subnet of you Vista machine. Now, your 3 machines are in same LAN.

good luck

[Schotty]

Configure your virtual machines' network adapter as Bridge.

Precisely.

NAT will NAT all the VMs to a common network, that gets its access from the host OS. However, in my line of work, that has caused more problems than its worth.

Bridged will cause the true network device to bridge to the virtual ones. So, lets say you have a really simple lan:

A DSL/Cable modem connected to a router.
All devices wired and wireless connect to the router.
All IPs are assigned via a DHCP server built into the router.
The useable address block is 192.168.0.0/24

Now, lets say on a laptop you prefer to use the WLAN as opposed to the wired (logical, right?).
Each VM is configured to use DHCP, as is each host. So that would allow us to have the following:

192.168.0.2 : Linux based laptop running FC8
192.168.0.3 : VM of Vista
192.168.0.4 : VM of OpenBSD
192.168.0.5 : VM of XP
192.168.0.6 : VM of RHEL

and so forth.

The bridged mode is best when you cannot rely on hard coded static IPs. Most of us run into that issue outside of an office; and even many offices prefer DHCP for simplicity.

To summarize:
Providing that your host OS can get access to a DHCP server, you are best off using bridged, and setting each guest OS to use DHCP as well. This will allow the VMs to access network shares, network appliances, and other IP based items that may reside on your LAN (Printers, TiVOs,NAS, MythTV's, etc)

Hope this helps. I have been using VMware on my machines for both work and pleasure for a number of years now (1999 or so). This was the first trick I needed to learn. Also make sure to utilize VMWare tools as it can make the VM go from a crawl to a speed demon