We recently installed VMWare player brought up a successfully virtualized Windows Server 2003 machine in our test environment at Concise HQ. As part of the testing, the 2003 server was to remain on a separate (192.168.1.x) subnet, and would only interact with networked devices from within that network segment.

The host machine has two network cards, one on the 192.168.1.x subnet, and one on another subnet. Unfortunately, the only choices under 'Network Connection' options were: Bridged, NAT, or Host-only. The connection is bridged, of course, but VMware Player wasn't intelligent enough to know which NIC on the host machine it was to utilize.

After an angry hour of frustration, followed by a half hour of research, it was determined that VMWare player actually does come with a utility to resolve this very issue!

To extract the utility:

1. In a command prompt, type the name of your VMware-player-executable, followed by -e .tmp (e.g. VMware-player-3.1.4-385536.exe -e .\tmp). This will extract the contents of your installation .exe into a subdirectory called tmp.

2. In the tmp folder, browse to 'network.cab' and extract it into your default VMWare Player installation directory (usually C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Player).

3. Execute vmnetcfg.exe!

4. Configure your NICs to your heart's content! See image below for details:

We hope that you find this information to be quite useful!

Team Concise