Harcey's Identity: Derrick Harcey's Weblog

I have been using VMWare Fusion Beta for Mac OSX since it was first released in beta. I have been using several VMWare images which require a static IP address on a hostonly network. Although the latest beta versions of Fusion support hostonly networking, it does not yet allow you to specify a specific network to use for hostonly networking. The following steps are how I manually configured hostonly networking for Fusion (beta 3 and 4).

$cd /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion

You can run the vmware-config-net.pl script to setup the hostonly network, but it does not give me a chance to specify my network range, like I can on the Linux version of VMWare Workstation with the vmware-config.pl, or directly in the Windows version through the GUI. These steps allowed me to force the network range to be the desired range.

First Stop vmware networking:

$sudo ./boot.sh --stop

Then check to see what network range was auto assigned to hostonly networking:

$ more config
vmnet1.hostonlyaddress = "192.168.157.1"
vmnet1.hostonlynetmask = "255.255.255.0"

Now grep the files in this directory to see where the network range is used:

$grep 192.168.157 *
config:vmnet1.hostonlyaddress = "192.168.157.1"
locations:answer VNET_1_HOSTONLY_HOSTADDR 192.168.157.1
locations:answer VNET_1_HOSTONLY_SUBNET 192.168.157.0
locations:answer VNET_1_HOSTONLY_HOSTADDR 192.168.157.1
locations:answer VNET_1_HOSTONLY_SUBNET 192.168.157.0
locations:answer VNET_1_HOSTONLY_HOSTADDR 192.168.157.1
locations:answer VNET_1_HOSTONLY_SUBNET 192.168.157.0
locations:answer VNET_1_HOSTONLY_HOSTADDR 192.168.157.1
locations:answer VNET_1_HOSTONLY_SUBNET 192.168.157.0
locations:answer VNET_1_HOSTONLY_HOSTADDR 192.168.157.1
locations:answer VNET_1_HOSTONLY_SUBNET 192.168.157.0
locations:answer VNET_1_HOSTONLY_HOSTADDR 192.168.157.1
locations:answer VNET_1_HOSTONLY_SUBNET 192.168.157.0
locations:answer VNET_1_HOSTONLY_HOSTADDR 192.168.157.1
locations:answer VNET_1_HOSTONLY_SUBNET 192.168.157.0
locations:answer VNET_1_HOSTONLY_HOSTADDR 192.168.157.1
locations:answer VNET_1_HOSTONLY_SUBNET 192.168.157.0
locations:answer VNET_1_HOSTONLY_HOSTADDR 192.168.157.1
locations:answer VNET_1_HOSTONLY_SUBNET 192.168.157.0
locations:answer VNET_1_HOSTONLY_HOSTADDR 192.168.157.1
locations:answer VNET_1_HOSTONLY_SUBNET 192.168.157.0
locations:answer VNET_1_HOSTONLY_HOSTADDR 192.168.157.1
locations:answer VNET_1_HOSTONLY_SUBNET 192.168.157.0
locations:answer VNET_1_HOSTONLY_HOSTADDR 192.168.157.1
locations:answer VNET_1_HOSTONLY_SUBNET 192.168.157.0

We see that config and locations reference this network range. Now edit these files to be the network range we desire, in my case, I want 192.168.159

Then we need to edit the vmnet1 dhcp configuration:

$cd vmnet1

Now also edit the network range in the dhcpd.conf file.

Start networking back up

$cd .. sudo ./boot.sh --start

Now VMWare networking is configured properly, and the VMWare image which is configured for hostonly networking on the network range will be reachable from the Mac.

One last step if you want to enable name resolution of your VMWare image in the local hosts table for the Mac so you don't have to always reference an IP address to reach the image, follow these steps (standard Mac OSX configuraiton):

Open the NetInfo Manager (under Application\Utilities) utility.

Under machines, add new entries for your VMWare image IP address and FQDN you want to use to access it. These entries only require a ip_address and a name to be defined.

now startup the image and it should be accessible on your desired hostonly network range.