How to tunnel a VMware virtual machine network adapter?

Question

I have a VMware virtual machine running on a Windows host.

Is there a way to tunnel the virtual network adapter so that it has an IP address of a SOCKS5 proxy instead of bridging or NATing one from the local network?

My use case is to prevent multiple virtual machines running locally from identifying that they are exist on the same host by probing the network.

Answer 1

NAT already obscures the existence of additional hosts running on the same machine, so that may already achieve your goal.

If you use NAT and want to add SOCKS5, just configure your guests to use SOCKS5 to access the Internet.

However, if you want to add guest-transparent SOCKS5 (no per-guest configuration), you'd need to set up a gateway that implements SOCKS5 inside a guest only network to provide other guests with SOCKS5 service.

VMware doesn't support proxies, so you need to provide a gateway to your virtual machines that does. The gateway would be another virtual machine running router software (PFSense, VyOS, etc.). The gateway VM would have two network interfaces. One bridges or NATs to the LAN and is the gateway's WAN interface. The other is connected to a virtual network and is the gateway's LAN interface. The virtual network has all the other guest machines bridged to it.

You would need to configure the gateway based on what you need SOCKS5 for and which gateway you use.