Broke (then fixed) VMware Player Networking

As many long-time readers are aware, I’m a big fan of virtualization. I like to do testing and dev work in virtual machines as that helps keep my primary machine(s) cleaner and leaner. It also lets me keep a whole fleet of machines around without needing all that extra hardware and expense.

I ran into an interesting situation this morning with networking though. See, I’ve been running VMware Player on my home machine for a few months with no issues. This works especially well when I’m doing some work projects – helps me keep things self-contained. I just schlep the VM clients around on external USB 2.0 hard drives.

Last night I installed the Hamachi client on that home machine. This morning I fired up my work virtual machine and had no network connection! It didn’t take more than 5 seconds for me to realize that it was probably related to the Hamachi install.

My theory was that VMware was trying to bridge my network with the Hamachi adapter instead of the LAN interface.

From my experience with VMware Server, I know about the Virtual Network Editor application. A quick look under the Start menu didn’t show it grouped with VMware Player, but a quick dive into the VMware Player install directory found the executable easily enough.

I ran the VNE app and was initially stymied: I could see everything but I couldn’t change anything. All the good stuff was disabled and grayed out:

Oh yeah, I’m running Vista. I bet things work better if I run it as Administrator… So I right-clicked on the vmnetcfg.exe and gave that a shot.

Lo and behold, I can change things now! I used the “Add” button to chose the Hamachi interface for exclusion and now my VMware clients are back on track.

Problem solved.

Possibly Related posts:

1. VMware Player 3.0 and Network Configuration
2. VMware Server Bridging Problem (fixed)
3. VMware Player is more than a Player
4. Virtual Conversion Virtually Ugly
5. Tip on vmnetcfg