Link to home
Start Free TrialLog in
Avatar of hbaber
hbaber

asked on

VMWARE: network 4 VM together on 4 physical boxes?

I have 4 physical XP Pro machines that run 1 VM of Windows 2003 on each. I need to create a seperate test network that all 4 VM (windows 2003 servers) can communicate with each other and use the host machine for internet connectivity only.  I don't want my corp domain to be able to access the test domain and vice versa.  


How do I do this?
Avatar of Trilotech
Trilotech

Well getting them on a separate subnet will make them unavailable to the rest of your network, but they will still communicate with each other.

Internet connectivity is a little harder. You would first have to add a second IP address to your REAL machine on the same subnet as the VM machines. Then do some kine of internet sharing on your computer for the VM machines to route through.
Avatar of Steve Knight
Well two ways I see.

Install a second nic in each physical machine and connect this as bridged to vmnet2 or whatever and configure your virtual machines to use custom nic vmnet2.  Connect the physical nics to a separate hub/switch.

If you want to route to the internet you need to turn on I routing on the XP host box and give the virtual nic 2 on that box an IP, e.g. x.x.x.1 then configure the default gateway on the virtual machines as x.x.x.1

Second way is similar to first except use a standard bridged nic in each virtual box and set the ip addresses to a different subnet - there should be no need to set an interface on the xp host with that IP at all unless you want to route to the internet through it in which case a second IP on the xp lan adaptor would do it.
Avatar of hbaber

ASKER

Dragon,

Can you elaborate on the "second way"  2 machines are using workstation and other 2 are using vmserver if it matters.  I am still confused on how to do this.
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
Avatar of Steve Knight
Steve Knight
Flag of United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland image

Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
Thanks for the answer, did you get it working in the end?

Steve
Avatar of hbaber

ASKER

no is the short answer, because I have not had a chance to work on it.  More pressing issues came up.
Fair enough, rainy day project I guess.  Good luck when you do, I've had similar things working recently OK so ask another Q when you do come to do it if any issues.
Steve