I've got a few VMWare machines I'm trying to get networked, but it seems that none of them are able to communicate beyond the VMWare lab environment.
The machines seem able to communicate with one another well enough. The problem comes when I want them to talk with anything that's not a VMWare box on the same host machine. All the guest systems' NICs are in Bridged mode, so they should be able to operate on the network as if they were completely separate from the host computer.
If I try to get any of the machines to pick up an IP address over DHCP, it fails. The host machine is on a wireless network, but Wireshark on the host does not pick up any DHCP requests from the guests. When manually configured, the guests still can't ping beyond the lab. Running netdiscover on one of the Backtrack boxes will show all of the VMWare guests but nothing outside of that.
Host: Windows 7 SP1 x64 running VMWare Player 3.1.5.
Guest1: Backtrack Linux 5 R1 (Downloaded as VMWare image)
Guest2: Backtrack Linux 5 R1 (Installed from ISO)
Guest3: Windows XP SP3
Guest4: RHEL (Version unknown)
Guest5: CentOS (Version unknown)
Guests 4 and 5 are the whole reason I'm running this in VMWare. I need to do a project with these systems, and they were given to me as VMWare images. Ordinarily, I'd rather use VirtualBox - I currently have a few VMs in VirtualBox which do not have this issue.
Any ideas on how I should troubleshoot this?
A few other notes, based on some chat discussion, of things which may or may not be relevant:
- The host system is connected to my home network via Wi-Fi.
- The Wi-Fi network is secured with WPA2-PSK and MAC address filtering.
- A "wireless isolation" feature may or may not also be enabled (I'll have to double-check).
- To reiterate: I only have this problem with VMWare-based guest systems. VirtualBox guests, when configured similarly, do not experience these symptoms.
