Virtualize MAC addresses on a single physical network interface

Background: I am working with an application that runs on a host machine that mainly identifies clients via MAC addresses (something that I would not like to change). I am attempting to simulate around 30 clients without gathering a cluster of physical computers or obtain multi-port network interfaces.

Is it possible to virtualize MAC addresses on a Windows machine without the use of virtual machines? I'd like to have the single NIC appear and function as two NICs with other networked machines with unique IPs (aliased) and MAC addresses.

It seems this is possible via Linux.

Is it possible to do this on Windows 7? If so, how?

BlueRidge

Posted 2015-05-08T22:40:30.287

Reputation: 131

This is much easier (almost trivial, in fact) using the Linux macvlan driver. Does it really have to be Windows? – Daniel B – 2015-05-19T16:50:19.283

It does not necessarily have to be Windows, but it is greatly preferred as our team mainly deals with Windows machines and C# codebases. If there is no possible way to accomplish virtualization similarly to macvlan in Windows, then we'll seriously consider Linux. – BlueRidge – 2015-05-19T17:00:05.160

Answers

According to Wikipedia's definition of MAC Address

A media access control address (MAC address) is a unique identifier assigned to network interfaces for communications on the physical network segment. MAC addresses are used as a network address for most IEEE 802 network technologies, including Ethernet and WiFi. Logically, MAC addresses are used in the media access control protocol sublayer of the OSI reference model.

So it does not make sense to be able to have more than one of them per phsycial adapter.

Your option on a single Windows host would be to employ virtualisation. With 4GB of RAM free you could stand up 30 VMs with ~128MB of RAM each. Plenty enough to run some networking. Or you could run half the VMs with double the adapters etc.

albal

Posted 2015-05-08T22:40:30.287

Reputation: 1 155

On Server Editions, or on Windows XP or 2K, install multiple instances of the Microsoft Loopback Adapter driver. Each gives you a separate (virtual) device, with it's own MAC and IP stack.

user165568

Posted 2015-05-08T22:40:30.287

Reputation: 421