A tip or two for VMware Fusion (OS X) guest networking
Before I get into this post too far, yes, I’m now a Mac user. Not exactly a fanboy yet, but my new employer let me choose between a Windows laptop and a MacBook for my work computer, so I chose–wisely. I’d been using Ubuntu on an HP laptop (ugh to HP) for a few years, so it seemed like a chance to try something new at no cost to me, which is my favorite cost.
As you can see from my other posts about virtualization, I’m a big fan of Virtualbox, but this post is about VMware Fusion, which was provided to me with my MacBook.
On to the tips…
I’ve been creating a testing environment for tacacs+ servers for a Cisco networking environment as well as Puppet server management, and I’m horrible with remembering IP addresses, unless there’s a very distinct pattern. When you use NAT in Fusion, addresses are assigned to guests VMs via DHCP in an automatically generated scope. The problem is, every time you boot your server you may get a new DHCP address! That sucks.
What to do?