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Chealion
Asked: 2009-09-15 12:43:27 +0800 CST

VMWare Fusion: Bridged Network Using a Bonded NIC

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I'm attempting to set up a virtual machine in VMWare Fusion (2.0.5) but am having issues getting bridged networking to start. Whenever I start a virtual machine that I wish to use bridged networking I am given the following error: "The network bridge device on /dev/vmnet0 is not running".

Running sudo /Library/Application\ Support/VMWare\ Fusion/boot.sh --restart does not fix this. An attempt to edit boot.sh to bind to bond0 instead of en0 wasn't successful.

On this server it's currently running Mac OS X Server 10.4.11 but will be updated to Mac OS X Server 10.6 in a couple months.

So, is it possible to use bridged networking with VMWare Fusion on a Mac that has a bonded network link? Is this only a Tiger limitation?

EDIT: Upgrading to Snow Leopard and 2.0.6 had no effect.

vmware-fusion

2 Answers

  1. Try the Tokamak Networking Scripts for VMware Fusion, they provide advanced networking setup and might possibly do what you're looking for...

    WARNING: If you have a Home Directory protected by FileVault, DO NOT INSTALL FROM WITHIN THAT DIRECTORY! It will mess up FileVault (happeend to me once)

    EDIT: You might also try this thread on the VMware community forums. An exerpt for you:

    After seeing this post by powervm: http://communities.vmware.com/thread/151384?tstart=0

I was able to get bonded nics/link aggregates to work.

edit /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/boot.sh and look for the vmnet-bridge section and edit accordingly.

vmnet-bridge puts itself in background (daemon mode)
Bridge to host network interface 'en0'.
"$LIBDIR/vmnet-bridge" -d /var/run/vmnet-bridge-vmnet0.pid vmnet0 en0
Bridge to host network interface 'en1'
"$LIBDIR/vmnet-bridge" -d /var/run/vmnet-bridge-vmnet2.pid vmnet2 en1
#"$LIBDIR/vmnet-bridge" -d /var/run/vmnet-bridge-vmnet3.pid vmnet3 bond0
Bridge to the primary host network interface (which can change over time).
#"$LIBDIR/vmnet-bridge" -d /var/run/vmnet-bridge-vmnet0.pid vmnet0 ''

Edit the vmx file for your virtual machine and change 

ethernet0.connectionType = "bridged"
ethernet0.vnet = "/dev/vmnet0"

to

ethernet0.connectionType = "custom"
ethernet0.vnet = "/dev/vmnet0"

make sure fusion isnt running and restart it with

sudo /Library/Application\ Support/VMware\ Fusion/boot.sh --restart 

Im not certain what speed im getting on the link in the VM, as task manager states it running at 10mb/s as does the driver. But I have network connectivity, which is all I wanted.
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  2. Despite the excellent suggestions by Josh, VMWare Fusion 2.x simply just would not bridge correctly.

    This has been fixed in Version 3.x released today (October 27th, 2009)

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