VMWare Fusion – Network Bridge error finally solved

A couple of years back, I posted this thread about an annoying problem in VMWare Fusion which occasionally stopped me from being able to run an image as in bridge mode.

Well, looks like I’ve finally sorted this one out.  I don’t know if it’s the inclusion of new functionality in v2 or v3 of VMF but after doing the below, I’ve not seen the problem occur for a couple of months now.  I can still easily reproduce this issue so I’m guessing it’s some kind of defect in the adaptor autodetect code [or a problem with my config somewhere].

To reproduce the problem, firstly the environment:

1. My MBP is connected to a wireless network only, running WPA2.
2. I’m running VMWare Fusion 3.0.2 (232708) on OS X 10.6.2 (Although this occurred on VMF v1 and v2 as well as OS X 10.5).
3. The VM is Windows 7 Ultimate (although this occurred with Win XP also).

Here is a screenshot of the VM network settings that cause the error message “The network bridge on device /dev/vmnet0 is not running”:

Choosing auto-detect breaks bridge networking every single time.
Fortunately the workaround is very simple.  Setting it to use a specific network adaptor fixes the problem immediately.

The down side to setting the specific adaptor is that when I’m in an environment without wireless and I need to use ethernet, I have to remember to change it in here.  I know that’s not a serious problem but it is irritating when I realise my MSN client has been disconnected for hours.

There have been a bunch of people commenting on the older post and it’s actually now my ‘most hit’ entry (finally overtaking the Outlook 12 beta one) so hopefully this will be of use to some people.

//ian

[Update: March 12th 2010 17:00ish]  Well, I got an @ from @VMWareFusion this afternoon saying “@ianmcshane BTW, we tried to repro this internally with your steps and it works just fine for us. There is something else missing here.”

So I guess YMMV but selecting the specific adaptor has certainly allowed my VM images to run in bridge mode.

You might also be interested in these posts:

1. VMWare Fusion and network bridging
2. Laptop consolidation