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I'm stuck with what seems a bug in VmWare Player (build 203739). I'm using W7 Ultimate 64bits as host and have a CentOS 5.4 (64 bits) as a guest and a Windows XP Professional SP3 (32 bits) as another guest. From the 64 bits machines (the host and the linux guest) I cannot ping the windows XP.

Off course, I already turned off the windows firewall in the guest and also in the host. The network is pretty basic, I'm using Vmnet8 (NAT), with DHCP and port forwarding (to the windows XP's IP). Everything is working ok, I have internet access from host and from both guests. Port forwarding to the XP guest is working ok too. The only problem is that I cannot access the XP guest through the Vmnet8.

I monitored the traffic using wireshark (in the host and in the windows guest). If I try to ping the XP guest from the host, what I see is the ARP request leaving the host, being answered by the guest and, after that, there is no echo request leaving the host. The same occurs if I try to ping the XP from the CentOs guest.

From the windows XP guest I can ping both the host and the CentOs guest. From the XP guest I can access the host shares. Obviously, from the host I cannot see the XP shares (as I cannot even ping the guest).

I want to maintain this setup (using NAT to share the host's internet connection). Any suggestions?

Chopper3
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2 Answers2

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VMware Player NAT is partially broken in Windows 7. Semi-OT: In my setup (FreeBSD guest, VMware player NAT, Windows 7 host), my guest can reach the Internet only if ICS is enabled on the Windows 7 public interface (i.e. allow VMnet8 to share it). However, enabling ICS breaks other things (like a VPN connection from the W7 host).

Routing on your system looks OK (both guests know to ARP each other instead of the gateway). If ARP is broken (guest answers but host does not receive the reply), I wonder if you can manually add the entries to the ARP table (arp -s) and get past that.

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The easiest way:

  1. NAT the host's internet connection upstream of the host. (in most environments this is already being done, particularly if a corporate firewall/router or home cable/DSL router is involved)
  2. Set both virtual machines to use bridged networking.
  3. Verify that the VMs have IP addresses on the same subnet as the host (either via DHCP or via manual assignment)
Skyhawk
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