Using VMware on ResNet

VMware is a popular PC emulation program that is known to cause issues on the Residential Network due to the MAC address security model in use on ResNet.

VMware supports two Ethernet addressing modes. In dynamic mode, VMware picks a random Ethernet address not currently being used on the LAN from the range 00:50:56:80:00:00 to 00:50:56:ff:ff:ff. In the static Ethernet address mode, you assign an Ethernet address to each VM from the range 00:50:56:00:00:00 to 00:50:56:3f:ff:ff. Since the WPI residential network will disable any port that recieves traffic from an ethernet address not explicitly registered to that port, you must use static mode. Static mode can be configured by adding a configuration block like this into the VMware configuration file:

# networking bridged to real ethernet
ethernet0.present = TRUE
ethernet0.connectionType = bridged
ethernet0.address = 00:50:56:xx:xx:xx

You can find the documentation on this at VMWare's Bridged Networking docs.

If you expect to be using VMware networking on the WPI ResNet, you will need to pick an unused static VMware Ethernet address and change your current VMware Ethernet address to that. You can find all the used VMware MAC addresses by using the Search function of NetReg to search for all VMware addresses currently registered.

You should change the address for your VM using the Network Registraion page to one that meets all of the above criteria. Don't forget to update your VMware configuration file as well.

Note: Any changes you make do not take effect until approximately 30 minutes after the form is submitted. If you run VMware before the changes have taken effect your outlet will turn off and require a manual reset by Network Operations before it will work again.

Maintained by webmaster@wpi.edu
Last modified: Feb 28, 2008, 23:13 EST