03- Modifying VMWare player network settings
There are times when you want to modify the settings for networking in VMWare Player. In VMWare Workstation, sure, there is a GUI tool to do this, but the situation in VMWare Player is more complex.
VMWare Player uses 192.168.75.0/24 for the NAT address range, and I would rather use 10.0.2.0/24. Why do I care? The address range I use in the classroom laboratory for instructor demos is 10.0.2.0/24, (with a gateway at 10.0.2.254) so by using the same address space and gateway on VMWare as in the lab, I can simply copy the systems from one network to another without having to manually update all of the statically assigned IP addresses on each system. It turns out that VMWare Workstation has a graphical tool that can be used to modify the network settings, but that tool does not come with VMWare Player.
Fortunately Leeland Artra ran across the problem as well, and provided instructions on how to make the change manually. Some folks on the VMWare Community Forums have also provided some documentation for these command line commands.
From an administrator prompt on the host, run
c:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Player>vnetlib.exe -- stop nat c:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Player>vnetlib.exe -- stop dhcp c:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Player>vnetlib.exe -- set vnet vmnet8 mask 255.255.255.0 c:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Player>vnetlib.exe -- set vnet vmnet8 addr 10.0.2.0 c:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Player>vnetlib.exe -- set adapter vmnet8 addr 10.0.2.2 c:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Player>vnetlib.exe -- set nat vmnet8 internalipaddr 10.0.2.254 c:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Player>vnetlib.exe -- update dhcp vmnet8 c:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Player>vnetlib.exe -- update nat vmnet8 c:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Player>vnetlib.exe -- update adapter vmnet8 c:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Player>vnetlib.exe -- start dhcp c:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Player>vnetlib.exe -- start nat
When all is finished, I end up with
c:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Player>ipconfig Windows IP Configuration --- output deleted --- Ethernet adapter VMware Network Adapter VMnet1: Connection-specific DNS Suffix . : Link-local IPv6 Address . . . . . : fe80::4967:40ce:b5f5:eff8%19 Autoconfiguration IPv4 Address. . : 169.254.239.248 Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.0.0 Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : Ethernet adapter VMware Network Adapter VMnet8: Connection-specific DNS Suffix . : Link-local IPv6 Address . . . . . : fe80::8b2:ef5d:394c:390f%20 IPv4 Address. . . . . . . . . . . : 10.0.2.2 Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0 Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . :
Here we see that the IP address of the Windows host will be 10.0.2.2- at least in so far as a VMWare guest running with NAT networking is considered.
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This did not work on Windows 10. I even tried changing the name of the adapter to “VMware Network Adapter VMnet8” and “VMnetAdapter8” (per listing in ipconfig and adapter hardware id property), but none worked. Any clue? The only changes were: My network is 10.0.0.0/24, Adapter IP: 10.0.0.10 and Gateway is 10.0.0.1.
Any clues?
I haven’t looked at VMWare Player in years, and would not be surprised that things have changed.
Never mind my previous comment, these steps work just fine in Windows 10 too. Was entering one wrong value that messed things up. Thank you.
i had a newly installed VMW WKSTN 12 player on WIN7 Pro and any VM copied or created was giving me a “a duplicate name exists on the network” error with resulting Iprange of 169.254… even when no dupes exists.
Lots of comments and suggestions in other sites but nothing resolved it for me til i ran the commands above from the admin prompt.
It could be that the previous IP range it picked was already existing. but just changing the VMnet8 was enough to also get VMnet1 working.
Running the commands also actually updates the vmnetdhcp.conf file and other files located in C:/ProgramData/VMware/. i noticed that before the above commands, it had several blank lines before the config lines started. but after running the commands, it was cleaned up.
What i also believe happened is in so running the commands, the associated registries was renewed and cleaned up. allowing my issue to go away. unfortunately i’m not expert enough in VMware to know what that detail entails.
Thank You for posting the above.
The 169.254.0.0/16 address space is a link-local address and is used when the system cannot find a valid IP address. I would check to see how you are assigning IP addresses to your systems- static or DHCP.
Thanks, worked for me with Windows 10 1903 DE x64 and VMWare Player 15.5.0 .
This is what I was looking for since a long time … VMWare “removed” the former “hack” of un-zip-ping the *.exe-file and one of the inner *.cab-files and starting “vmnet.exe” (or similar)
You can see content of vmware installer with 7zip … find network.cab and inside you find the vmnetcfg.exe 🙂