How to fix network Connectivity of guest VM moved from one machine to another?

Question

Upgrading my PC, I am moving everything I had in the old one to the new one, including my VMWare Workstation VMs.

In my older PC, I had VMWare Workstation 6.5 installed. In my new PC, I have VMWare Player 7 installed.

All VMs open and run fine in the new PC, except for connection to the network (Ethernet connection).

To simplify things, I gave the new PC the same exact IP address as old one's (192.168.7.8). I can afford doing so because the old PC and the new PC are never on simultaneously.

But that doesn't help: The VMs on the old PC have no problem connecting to the 192.168.7.x subnet, while the same exact VMs on the new PC (which has no problem accessing that subnet), cannot see the subnet (despite having a static address on that subnet). They can't even see the router, which is 192.168.7.1.

Any idea how to troubleshoot and fix this problem?

Answer 1

Success!

Here is what I did, in case someone else encounters a similar problem:

I configured the VM's settings via Edit virtual machine settings while the (guest) VM is off:

to have use NAT instead of bridged networking

And to eliminate any storage related problems

The result was a beautifully working network connection inside the VM, both in LAN and outside to the Internet

As an added bonus, this also solved the choppy sound problem I had inside the VM. Weird.

But what's really interesting is that both in-LAN and out-Internet work perfectly despite the DHCP/NAT addresses provided to the VM are totally unrelated to the subnet (192.168.7.x). Now that's weird.