VMWare Player on laptop - maintaining connection when wireless disconnected

Question

Hi

I'm a complete newbie to VMWare and troubleshooting networking issues.

I'm running the buildix app through VMWare Player on my laptop. Things work fine when I'm connected to my home wireless network.

However, when I'm not connected to a network, my wireless card is turned off (eg., to save power) or when I'm connected to another wireless network, the Buildix appliance / VMWare player fails to get an ip address.

I only want the appliance to be able to communicate with my laptop.

I've tried this in all 3 networking modes : Host-Only (which is what I believe I want), NAT and Bridged, all with no success.

I've also taken a look at the settings by running vmnetcfg.exe in the VMWare Player install dir, but can't see anything obvious here.

Can someone please assist?

Regards

Marty

Answer 1

Host-Only mode is probably the way to go in your case. The problem is NAT and Bridged mode are relying on some third-party DHCP server to provide an IP address, and that server is not available when you are running disconnected.

VMware Workstation (not sure about Player) provides a built-in DHCP server if your machine is configured onto the right virtual network switch. You can also adjust which virtual switch has the DHCP server, what IP addresses it gives out, etc.

If Player does not support this feature, you may be forced into setting the IP address of the virtual machine manually. This is dependent on what OS you are running.