how to choose the proper network adapter

[VMware Community Member]

I have VM workstation pro on a desktop computer with windows 10 pro on it. and I understand how to configure the VMware fine except for one thing. I created 2 different VM's on the computer and want to use it with either TeamViewer or Splashtop to allow TWO (2) separate users to login remotely to their perspective VM,s and It works Great but I cant figure out how should I setup the Networks for each VM rather than just Bridged to make the speed to the fullest capacity of the network card. How would you suggest this> Maybe create a new network? or create each user a new one?  any help would be great please.

[Technogeezer]

If you want users on external computers to access VMs on your computer, you either

• configure the VMs for Bridged networking so they are directly visible to the network,
• or configure NAT port forwarding. You'll need to forward unused ports on your host machine to the IP and port number of the display server in your VMs. 

For NAT networking, Assume that

• VMs are on a NAT network with VM1  172.1.2.3 and VM2 172.1.2.4
• the application port for the display service you want to connect to is port 7000 on each VM
• the host address is 192.168.3.10
• Ports 10001 and 10002 are unused on your host

Your NAT port forwarding rules would be to forward port 10001 to VM1  172.1.2.3 port 7000, and port 10002 to 172.1.2.4 (VM2) port 7000

The display clients wanting to connect to VM1 would use 192.168.3.10 port 10001, and the display clients wanting to connect to VM2 would use 192.168.3.10 port 10002.

Both NAT and Bridged networking will share the network card so you only have so much bandwidth coming into the host. Unless you have another network card coming into your PC there's little value in trying to create "another network:.

I would think that Bridged networking would give you the best performance, though. Bridged networking doesn't have the slight overhead of the NAT "firewall". 

You haven't said what guest operating systems you are running as VMs, but you also need to think about other performance impacts.

You might want to investigate changing the virtual network card type to vmxnet3 if it isn't set that way already.

I also assume that your desktop computer has sufficient cores and memory to allow the VMs to run efficiently. Rules of thumb:

You want to make sure that the VMs have sufficient memory so they don't have memory contention within the VM, and the total of the memory allocations of each VM doesn't drive the host into memory contention.

Same thing for CPUs - you want to make sure that there are sufficient CPUs configured for each VM, and that the total number of virtual CPUs is no more than than the number of physical (not hyperthreaded) cores minus 2  in your host.