VMware Server Bridging Problem (fixed)

Posted on December 22, 2008 No Comments

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Sometimes you just have to give credit…

Earlier today I installed VMware Server on a machine at work and then built a client Windows 2003 server on it. The install went smoothly, but once it was up and running I found I couldn’t get it on the network. In fact, I couldn’t even ping the gateway by IP address.

I installed the VMware tools thinking maybe I was missing drivers, but that didn’t fix it. I spent way too much time messing around with the client’s IP configuration as I was assuming that the issue must be something I’d typed or set wrong. However, after an hour of no progress I had to suck it up and search the web.

Fortunately, I found my answer almost immediately at the #ifdef blog. Turned out to be a VMware Server configuration issue – it was grabbing the Hamachi LAN adapter instead of the Ethernet adapter.

The fix was to force the VMnet0 controller choice rather than allow it to bridge to an automatically chosen adapter. By doing that, the virtual machine was able to get an IP on the LAN.

A few clicks and I was up and networking properly.

I love finding answers on other blogs. Ironically, I searched for something last week and found the answer in a post I’d written here 2 years ago. Kind of embarrassing… I didn’t remember writing about it until I saw the search results!

Tags: network, troubleshooting, vmware, VMware-Server, windows-2003

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