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I’m running VMWare Fusion 2 on my Mac. I’ve got three Windows XP Pro SP3 virtual machines set up (from the same Windows disc - one installed from scratch, the other two copies of that original VMWare file).

When I run more than one VM at once, only one of them gets an internet connections. This is true whether I have the network adapters for both set to NAT, Bridged, or set one on NAT and one on Bridged.

Surely there’s a way to have two virtual machines running, and on the internet at the same time?

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Make sure the MAC (hardware) addresses of the virtual network adapters in your VMs are unique. If you created a VM by copying it from another VM, it's possible they ended up with identical MAC addresses.

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    +1 on the requirement for unique MAC addresses in each VM – EmmEff Oct 13 '09 at 23:26
  • Aha, yes, both VMs have the same Mac address. (Originally, I created one VM and installed Windows on it, then copied the VM file to create the other VM.) Any idea if I can change the Mac address now? Or should I delete the second VM, and re-create by installing afresh from the Windows disc? – Paul D. Waite Oct 14 '09 at 11:43
  • I'm not sure about Fusion, but other VMware products let you set the MAC address in the Virtual Machine settings. You probably need to shut down your VMs before you can modify those settings. – Heath Oct 14 '09 at 15:56
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    This from VMWare tech support (who were very responsive) — copying the VM files did indeed result in 3 VMs with the same Mac address. In theory, selecting the “I copied this VM” option when opening the copied VM should work, but if it doesn’t, you can open the .vmx file inside the virtual machine bundle and change the Mac address value in the line containing “ethernet0.generatedAddress” – Paul D. Waite Oct 14 '09 at 21:37
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VMware Fusion does not impose such networking limitations. Something else is at play here, but I have no idea what it might be.

If you run "ipconfig /all" from a Command prompt in each VM instance, do you see a unique IP address assigned to each virtual machine?

If you cloned a master Windows VM image, did you use a tool to create unique machine SIDs for each instance? Something like NewSID, for example. Even if you didn't, I do not believe this would affect TCP/IP networking at all.

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