Ian McShane » VMware Fusion

VMWare Fusion – Network Bridge error finally solved

Ian — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 12:34:46 +0000

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:

My MBP is connected to a wireless network only, running WPA2.
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).
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.

VMWare Fusion and network bridging

Ian — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 23:09:05 +0000

** UPDATED MARCH 12 2010: I just posted my solution to this problem here **

I’ve had VMWare Fusion running an image of my work laptop, on my Macbook, for nearly three weeks now. I’ve had no problems at all, running over both NAT and via network bridge.

Until this week.

Now, when I try to use the image over network bridge I get the error “The network bridge on device /dev/vmnet0 is not running”. It still works over NAT but i’m perplexed as to where this problem has come from. No software updates, no network config changes, nothing that I can think would affect this at all.

I started to wonder if it was something to do with being assigned a bridged DHCP on my home lan (10.0.0.X), suspending and being brought up on the work lan under a different subnet completely. Maybe something was going majorly wrong with the bridge device.

I couldn’t/can’t find anything logged anywhere other than the error message above in the vmware.log within the VM image folder.

Running the following command restarts all the vmnet related services:

/Library/Application\ Support/VMWare\ Fusion/boot.sh –restart

You’ll need to sudo that command.

I haven’t found anything on the VMWare community forums to indicate that this has been bugged for fix in a later release so i’m still not entirely sure of the cause…

Laptop consolidation

Ian — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 18:37:17 +0000

Continuing my “Switch To Mac” project, i’ve been trying to work out how far I can go in replacing my work laptop with my own Macbook.
Now, my work laptop is a real bone of contention. It’s a piece of crap Dell Latitude D600. In the past 9 months, the HD has gone three times, a memory module has bust and it has had to be re-imaged by the internal IS&T team 4 times in total. Each time it is re-imaged is two days of almost 100% downtime.
Unfortunately this re-imaging can’t be done myself as our VPN solution requires a specific AD tied RSA token and without AD domain admin style access I can’t generate a new token and assign it to my account.
I was checking out the ‘Black Friday’ sale that Apple ran for the UK yesterday (30th November) as i’d decided to pick up a license for iWork ‘08 whilst it was on sale, when I saw VMWare Fusion on there also at a discounted rate.
I’d nearly bought Parallels a couple of days ago but was waiting to speak to a colleague who has recently picked up a MBP to use for work. He’d mentioned Fusion before but I hadn’t heard how he was getting on.
This led me over to the VMWare Fusion site where I noticed the VMWare Converter. An application you can use to create an exact virtualised replica of a physical device (providing you have administrative access to it obviously). I’d heard about the Enterprise version of this app but hadn’t realised that they had released a kind of consumer version.
I downloaded Converter and the 30 day trial of VMWare Fusion (VMF from now on) and set about taking an image of my work XP SP2 install.

After 3 failed attempts at taking an image (Notes: Turn off screensavers, turn off power management) I finally managed to get a good image, weighing in at just over 16GB. Transfered to my MB, load into VMF and shazam.
I’ve set the NIC to bridge to the network so it appears as it’s own device rather than NATing my MB address.
Everything works, VPN and all. Amusingly, performance of the VM is _actually_ better than the physical machine!

Uploaded with Skitch!

Now, just need to get iSight working in XP….