Working Principle of Virtual Machine vmware3 network modes (bridging, Nat, host-only)

VMware network configuration details 1: Introduction to three network Modes

After the virtual machine is installed, two NICs are added to the network connection:

Among them, vmnet1 is the network interface in the host-only mode of the virtual machine, and vmnet8 is the network interface in the NAT mode, which will be described in detail later.

Click Edit virtual machine settings as follows ,:

Select Ethernet on the hardware tab. The network connection framework on the left has the following four single options:

1. bridged (Bridging Mode)

In the bridge mode, the Virtual Operating System of VMware is like an independent host in the LAN. It can access any machine in the network, but you need more than one IP address, you also need to manually configure the IP address subnet mask for the virtual system, and also need to be in the same network segment as the host machine, so that the virtual system can communicate with the host machine

If you want to use VMware to create a virtual server in the LAN to provide network services for LAN users, you should select the bridge mode.

2. NAT (network address translation mode)

The Nat mode enables the virtual system to use the NAT (Network Address Translation) function to access the public network through the network where the host machine is located. That is to say, in Nat mode, you can access the TCP/IP configuration information of the Virtual System in Internet-based NAT mode. It is provided by the DHCP server of the vmnet8 (NAT) virtual network, the virtual system cannot be manually modified, so it cannot communicate with other real hosts in the Local Area Network. The biggest advantage of the NAT mode is that the virtual system is very easy to access the Internet, you do not need to perform any other configuration. You only need the host machine to access the Internet.

If you want to use VMware to install a new virtual system, you can directly access the Internet without manual configuration in the virtual system. We recommend that you use the NAT mode.

3. Host-only (Host Mode)

In some special network debugging environments, you must isolate the real environment from the virtual environment. In this case, you can use the host-only mode in the host-only mode, all virtual systems can communicate with each other, however, the virtual system and the real network are isolated and can be shared using the Internet connection provided in Windows XP (in fact, it is a simple route Nat) to allow virtual machines to access the virtual system through the host's real network card TCP/IP configuration information (such as the IP address gateway address DNS server), all by vmnet1 (host-only) DHCP servers in the virtual network are dynamically allocated.

If you want to use VMware to create a virtual system isolated from other machines in the network and perform some special network debugging, you can select the host-only mode.

The preceding figure shows the working principle of the three network modes (bridging, Nat, and host-only) of the Virtual Machine VMware.