Tag Archives: VMWare Player

Connecting VMs between Virtualbox and VMWare Player

Storage & Virtualization,

I had written blogs earlier on using Virtualbox and VMWare Player. I recently had a need to connect VMs running on Virtualbox and VMWare player. This is for my Windows laptop. I found the procedure mentioned in this link to be very useful. There are 2 options.

  1. Use bridged mechanism. Create a networking interface with bridged adapter on Virtualbox and map it to 1 of the physical adapters. Create a networking interface with bridged adapter on VMWare player and map it to the same physical adapter as Virtualbox. In this option, the connection between the 2 hosts is established through external router. It is possible that the router blocks this external communication. Even after clearing the firewall rules on the router, I was not able to get Virtualbox VM talk to VMWare player VM with this approach. I was able to get Virtual box VMs using bridged adapters to talk to each other, same with VMWare player. I feel that there is some filtering enforced either by Virtualbox or VMWare and I am not able to find the reason…
  2. Use host-only adapter mechanism. Create a host-only adapter on Virtualbox and create a networking interface on the VM and map it to the host-only adapter created. The host-only adapter can be configured with/without dhcp. Open “vmnetcfg” to map 1 of the VMWare adapters to bridged host-only adapter that was created with Virtualbox. I have captured details of  “vmnetcfg” in my VMWare player blog. On the VM with VMWare player, create a networking interface and map it to the custom VMNetx interface that was bridged to the Virtualbox adapter. After this, the 2 VMs will be able to talk to each other using the host-only network. This option does not have the disadvantage of dependency on external router and firewall.

References:

VMWare Player and VM Networking

Storage & Virtualization,

VMWare Player is the Virtualization software/hypervisor provided free of charge by VMWare. Player is for personal use. Paid versions are available as VMWare Player Pro or VMWare Workstation. Following link covers the differences between different editions. I have used Virtualbox for most of my VM needs. There were few recent scenarios where I had to use VMWare Player and in this blog, I will share some things that I learnt as part of this process.

Networking Options:

  1. Bridged – This is equivalent to the Bridged option provided by Virtualbox. This is present by default. VMnet0 is used for this.
  2. NAT – This is equivalent to the NAT option provided by Virtualbox. This is available as VMNet8 in the host machine and is present by default.
  3. Host only – This is equivalent to Host only option provided by Virtualbox. The difference is that only 1 network is present by default. This is available as VMNet1 is the host machine. To change the default subnet created, we need vmnetcfg utility.
  4. Custom – This is a variation of Host only option where we can create more networks and associate with VMNet2, 3, etc. This is not available by default and we need vmnetcfg utility to create custom networks.
  5. LAN Segments – This is similar to Custom network. Here, there is no host connectivity and no dhcp servers. Advantage with LAN segment is we dont have limit on the number of networks.

vmnetcfg utility:

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