If you
run VMware Player, you would have 3 networking options for virtual machines
running there: Bridged, NAT, Host-Only. In the latest 5.0.1, I also found a new
one: LAN Segment. This blog has a
nice explanation on these three settings if you want to get more details.
In most
of cases, I use NAT for networking because the virtual machine can have Internet
access which allows me to install additional software as needed. By default,
VMware Player uses DHCP to dynamically assign IP address while using NAT. So
you cannot guarantee to get same IP address after each rebooting.
You can
set static IP address for a VM running on VMware Player with a little trick. On
a Debian Linux machine like Ubuntu, you can edit a configuration file:
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$ sudo vim /etc/network/interfaces
# This file describes the network interfaces
available on your system
# and how to activate them. For more
information, see interfaces(5)
# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
# The primary network interface
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
address 192.168.47.200
netmask 255.255.255.0
broadcast 192.168.47.255
gateway 192.168.47.2
dns-nameservers 192.168.47.2
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After
saving the file, you would like to restart the network so that the change take
effect:
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$ sudo service networking
restart
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In my
case, the VMnet8 which is the network adapter for the NAT network has an IP
address of 192.168.47.1. When I first modified the interfaces file, I used it
as the gateway IP address and failed to ping outside the network.
To
figure it out why, I reversed back to the DHCP configuration (change the ifacce
line to “iface eth0 dhcp” and delete the lines afterwards). In the DHCP mode,
typing command “route –n” will show working gateway IP address: 192.168.47.2.
By
default, the gateway IP is configured to use X.X.X.2. This can be changed with
Virtual Network Editor which is not included in VMware Player. I will show you
how to hack it in next post.
