VMware Player and Bridged Connections
Lost an hour today moving a VM from Fusion to VMware’s free VMware Player on Windows. The VPN I have to connect to will not work unless VMware’s connection is set to Bridged. On a machine with multiple network connections, this will not always be an active connection — for instance, getting the “best” connection from the OS could result in a wired connection that isn’t plugged in or it could, in my case, result in binding the bridged connection a Parallels virtual network adapter.
So, how does one go about fixing this? Enter vmnetcfg.exe. If you go to “%PROGRAMFILES%\VMWa
re\VMWare Player” and launch vmnetcfg.exe, you can configure all of your connections for virtual machines hosted in VMWare Player. In my case, I simply modified connection 0 to always use the same adapter — taking away the choice from the software — and restarted. Since then, all has been good.