Creating a link to an external network on VM Workstation

Topic probably does nothing to describe my problem.

I am creating a test environment on my work pc, and want to isolate it from our network, but I do want to have access to the external network. Networking with virtual machines is a huge question mark to me, so all info is mucho appreciated. I currently have the viirtual machines set up on a seperate virtual network. What should i be doing?

Thanks!

John

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jibbajabba

Do you need access to your company network because of internet of just because you want to transfer files etc. ? Because of that you could just enable shared folder.

Not sure if I understand right you see ... so you want to have isolation but you don't at the same time ..

sorry .. what was the question

Well what I personally did was creating one virtual switch internal only .. Then I had one server which had two network cards, one connected to the hosts one and one to the internal only switch .. all the other ones were connected to the internal one only ......

But again - it depends what the purpose is .. internet or simple file sharing ...

dynamik

Gomjaba wrote:

Not sure if I understand right you see ... so you want to have isolation but you don't at the same time ..

I'm glad I wasn't the only one that was tripped up over that

So you want internet access without allowing access to the rest of your network? I know with ESX, you can do VLAN tagging, but I don't think you can with Workstation. I was going to say you could put them on a separate VLAN that only has internet access. I guess you could always add a second NIC and bridge/NAT your VMs to that. Depending on your client firewall software, you might be able to do something similar by blocking all traffic headed towards your LAN except for your gateway.

jibbajabba

An overkill fix would be RRAS on the server which has access to both server, or you do the easy quick fix and use ICS or http://www.youngzsoft.net/ccproxy/

But yea - we'd need a bit more infos ...

cnfuzzd

yeah, my op was pretty vague, let me attempt to clarify.

really, what I want to do is have the virtual machines on a seperate broadcast domain from the production network. I could create a vm with two nics, one on the virtual machine network, the other on the production network through the host, and then enable routing. Would this work? Is there a more 'elegant' solution with workstation?

Really, what I want to be able to do is use our remote support tool to access my test network at anytime. The remote support tool, NetSupport Manager if you are familiar, client will "log into" a gateway over the internet. Mostly, this is for me to configure and play with the various things on the test network. However, there is also a chance that I would need this to demo up certain features of server 2k8 or powershell or etc etc etc.

So, yeah, that really doesn't seem any more clear. Hopefully it makes more sense. Just keep yelling at me and sooner or later I will get around to figuring out what I need.

Thanks!

John

dynamik

Just set the NIC in the VM to use NAT.

Do you need to connect to your VMs from outside your machine or just access the network from the VMs?

cnfuzzd

dynamik wrote:

Just set the NIC in the VM to use NAT.

Do you need to connect to your VMs from outside your machine or just access the network from the VMs?

I will need to connect directly to the virtual machines across the internet.

dynamik

If you go edit > virtual network editor > NAT > Edit there is an option to setup port forwarding. I'm not sure if that would work if you need more than one machine being accessible from a specific port though. I haven't used that myself, and it's not documented very well, so YMMV. It might be worth looking into though.

cnfuzzd

dynamik wrote:

If you go edit > virtual network editor > NAT > Edit there is an option to setup port forwarding. I'm not sure if that would work if you need more than one machine being accessible from a specific port though. I haven't used that myself, and it's not documented very well, so YMMV. It might be worth looking into though.

Sweet! I will see what I can come up with, and let you know.

Thanks!

john

cnfuzzd

I tried the NAT, but it was not working the way I really wanted.

I ended up just adding a nic to one of the servers and putting it on the external network, and putting the second nic and all the virtual machines on an isolated virtual switch.

thankks for the help guys!

john