At work we often have a requirement to test out things on our network, as if we were an external user. It’s useful to check that firewall settings are right, or to check access rights. We recently had an ADSL connection installed which serves that purpose.
Via some spare fibres and various spare switches, we’ve got access to it in various switch closets. I wanted to be able to access it from my desktop. My preference was to use a virtual machine, which I could set up with all the software I needed and test. This would mean bridging said virtual machine to that network.
I added a second network adapter to my PC, unbound it from all the local protocols (so my PC doesn’t touch that network) and set VMware Player to use bridged mode. With VMware workstation, you can use the virtual network tool to configure which NIC bridges to the virtual machines. However, that tool is missing with VMware player. By default, it was bridging to my first NIC, which was no good, as it was on the uni network.
A little bit of clicking around, and I found that there is a protocol bound to all the network cards called VMware Bridge Protocol. By default, it seems to bind itself to all the NICs. I simply unbound it from my main NIC:
And left it bound to the NIC connected to the ADSL network:
I restarted VMware Player, and my virtual machine nows bridges to the ADSL connection.