Overview

VMware Workstation 6.0 is installed on a 3GHz, XP SP2 host with 3Gb RAM. For some reason, NAT no longer works correctly. VMs obtain an IP correctly via DHCP but cannot PING to the outside world/network. This was observed under a Windows 2003 Guest OS but also in Suse 10.1

I’ve since read that there are issues with NAT failing with Windows 2003 Server, but the failure there isn’t real but a DNS issue. This is well documented - including the fix - here.

Resolution Attempts

  1. Re-installation of VMware Workstation 6.0 several times did not resolve thing.
  2. Editing the Registry to remove all networks (Vmnet1, vmnet8) also made no difference.
  3. It was found, however, on a test VM Guest that despite VMnet1 being assigned, the subnet and IP picked up by the VM were that of Vmnet8, so clearly something is messed up rather well.

A similar problem is reported here.

Also, the host PC was starting and stopping rather slowly after a system crash - for a 3GHz machine with 3Gb RAM, this indicated a problem. The swap file was recreated (I know, probably doesn’t need one), system disk error-checked and a new administrator account created and Workstation 6.0 re-installed as this new user. This greatly speeded things up, indicating profile corruption, but did not resolve the problem.

The Windows route Command

I suspect something is awry with the internal routing of Windows.

Using a clean XP SP2 host installation on a separate machine, I ran the command

route print * > route_clean.txt

to obtain a clean, VMware-free copy of what the routing information should be like. I then installed VMware Workstation 6.0, the same version that’s giving trouble just now with NAT. And when I get that done, I’ll write what I find!