Sungju's Slow Life

There’s a time you want to use fixed address even for your NATed VM guest. In the case of VMware, you can achieve this by modifying configuration file in ‘/Library/Preferences/VMware Fusion/vmnet8’. vmnet8 is the virtual interface for NATed guests. You can find what ranges are currently applied for this virtual guests by checking dhcpd.conf.

$ cat '/Library/Preferences/VMware Fusion/vmnet8/dhcpd.conf'
...
subnet 192.168.210.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
        range 192.168.210.128 192.168.210.254;
        option broadcast-address 192.168.210.255;
        option domain-name-servers 192.168.210.2;
        option domain-name localdomain;
        default-lease-time 1800;                # default is 30 minutes
        max-lease-time 7200;                    # default is 2 hours
        option netbios-name-servers 192.168.210.2;
        option routers 192.168.210.2;
}
...

To set specific IP for a guest, you should check guest’s MAC address first. You can find it in the guest’s settings button or by running ‘ifconfig’ from the guest. In this case, I want to use 192.168.210.134 for my guest. So, I added the below lines in dhcpd.conf.

$  sudo vi '/Library/Preferences/VMware Fusion/vmnet8/dhcpd.conf'
...
host ubuntu64-vm {
        hardware ethernet 00:0C:29:CC:A4:96;
        fixed-address 192.168.210.134;
}

Some document says it will be applied when you restart VMWare Fusion, but in my case, I had to restart the Mac.