Can VMWare be configured to use a proxy?

I'm evaluating some software solutions, so a simple "yes" or "no" would be nice. I'm having some issues getting a simple answer with my own searches...

The configuration would work like this: I have a VM (guest OS shouldn't matter), running in VMWare Workstation on an MS-Windows OS host. The host can access a proxy server (a SOCKS or HTTP proxy) to connect to the internet if it needs to.

Can I configure the VMWare VM container to use the proxy server for all its internet and network access, such that the guest OS has no idea it's going through a proxy? It simply sees the internet directly.

Thus have VMWare do the proxy handling, instead of the host OS or the guest OS.

DragonFax

Posted 2011-04-21T23:20:03.487

Reputation: 373

Answers

One way of doing this might be creating one VM that acts as a router which then does the transparent proxy for you using something like redsocks. Then configure your other VMs to use this one as their default gateway.

There is a procedure on how to configure a server as a transparent socks proxy available at: http://przemoc.net/tips/linux#making_socks_proxy_transparent

And some general information about redsocks here: http://darkk.net.ru/redsocks/

Andre Miller

Posted 2011-04-21T23:20:03.487

Reputation: 291

VMware Workstation (or any other VMware product that I know of) does not natively have this functionality.

Your best bet is to set up a transparent proxy on your network, which will require configuring your gateway to forward whatever traffic (port 80, etc) you are trying to proxy.

Hyppy

Posted 2011-04-21T23:20:03.487

Reputation: 3 636

This is the answer. VMWare is fairly lame in this respect. – wilsotc – 2017-03-27T17:28:47.097

https://learningnetwork.cisco.com/docs/DOC-30457 – wilsotc – 2017-03-27T17:31:40.267

You'll want to look into these options within VMWare (I know VirtualBox.org has them, and so I'm hoping that VMWare does too):

transparent proxy
NAT

Internally, your guest(s) will need an internal/private IP address instead of a real public IP address, unless you know how to do some really advanced things with routing.

Alternatively, you should be able to configure your guest VM to have its own NIC (albeit a virtual NIC that gets its own IP address from the DHCP server independent of the host, etc.), but then you'd be bypassing the proxy which isn't what you want.

Randolf Richardson

Posted 2011-04-21T23:20:03.487

Reputation: 14 002