VMWare bridged networking intermittently failing

This is one of those ’note to self’ postings…

I have a VMWare box that uses bridged networking and has a static DHCP address that I use for a specific client’s testing as a db server. Every so often the virtual machine fails to connect to the network properly and ends up with a bogus ip address. I then spend ages trying to work out what’s going wrong…

This link, may help. It explains about using vmnetcfg.exe to adjust the bridged networking settings on the host machine.

The reason that the automatic bridging fails sometimes on my development box is that I have several NICs on the box. One pair are teamed and provide my internet access. Another is the 10Gb test network that I have wired back-to-back with my test server. When the test server is on and the 10Gb NIC is active the automatic bridging gets confused and the virtual machine’s network connection fails.

The solution, for me, is to use vmnetcfg.exe to adjust the bridge networking settings and unselect the 10Gb NIC.