Network Bridge Mode Not Working Windows 11 Host

[da-Peter]

Hi guys,

 

It's been so far a pretty crazy way to get support from anyone. Well, to be honest, no support was given from VMware. Seems they don't care for the little guy anymore, just major corporations. Well maybe you guys can help me out.

Also you can install a demo of their products to see if they fit your needs but they don't want to give you any support until you bought it. But why would you buy something not working? That's a step i don't understand but it has become common in the world nowadays.

I installed the workstation 16 pro demo to see if i get it to do what i need and then buy a license.

 

Well installation worked fine but i can't get the bridged network to work at all.

It's not a guest OS issue, as i tried different versions of windows and Linux and none of them work with bridged network. However NAT seems to work all the time so far.

My host is windows 11 with the latest updates as of writing of this post.

 

I tried all the troubleshooting steps found here in the forum.

• Restarted vmnetbridge in Windows
• Deactivated firewall (Norton)
• Uninstalled VPN
• Reset to defaults in network editor
• Disabled all other network adapters in widows host.
• Specified eth0 instead of bridged connection
• Set the bridged connection to my wifi adapter on host instead of automatic

I think that's all the steps i did so far. Oh course rebooted guest and host numerous times and in-between changes.

 

I can't get it to work. I am using a brand new laptop. Only a few weeks old. Hardware to new for workstation 16? I also tried to connect to different WiFi networks as well but nothing.

I am at a loss here. Maybe you guys have more ideas. Would like to get it figured out before the evaluation period expires. If it works, i can buy a license. If not, i don't know what to do to troubleshoot.

 

Thanks in advance

[continuum]

I am probably a little bit outdated ... but I always thought VMware networking plus Norton was hopeless.
I also thought that disabling Norton Firewall is impossible.
Are you sure that disabling Norton works at all ?

Anyway - not sure where you are located ... I would be interested in having a closer look via Teamviewer ....

Ulli

[da-Peter]

Hey,

 

thanks for your quick reply. Yeah, I can disable Norton and it actually is disabled as far as I can tell. On another older PC, I tried workstation 15 and it was a Win10 PC. There was never any issue using a bridged connection. Nothing special was needed on my "old" PC. Just set it to bridged (automatic) and it worked. Norton was on and no issues. 

Norton is actually the same software on both PCs. My newer laptop, the one with the issue is running Windows 11 from the factory, no update. 

I was trying to see if Workstation 15 is available for download so I can test it against win11 on my laptop. No luck finding a link for that. I will do some further investigation. Any other ideas, things anyone can think of? 

I might be able to find a USB wifi adapter and see if my built-in adapter has an issue. It's an Intel wifi chipset, I have to look up what type it is once I get back home. Could the Wifi device/chip/driver even be an issue? The driver is up to date as well. Workstation 16 is up to date also.

[CarltonR]

I would suggest that you break the problem down and verify a few things before uninstalling and disabling things.

You have to be aware that there are a few things that VMware Bridge Mode uses to work successfully, that, if the VM is using DHCP then the IP will be obtained from your local network router [DHCP service], however, if the VM client has static network settings then the networks IP setting has to be within the same subnet of the local network router . . . and, clearly that the VM  is configure for Bridge mode.

So with this in mind, may I suggest:

- [VM] on the VM confirm that the network settings are appropriate, 'command prompt - ipconfig/all' [IP address, subnet mask, default gateway, DNS, etc.,]

You might also like to try, as part of the diagnostics, to set the VM to DHCP (if not already so), and connecting the laptop to the LAN rather than the Wi-Fi.

As an aside I use Norton without any issue.

 

[Amended, to strike-out host comment in response to  comment]

[RDPetruska]

Carlton,

Actually there is NO "Bridged Adapter"... the VMnet1 is the adapter for the Host-Only networking.  The Bridged networking requires the "VMware Bridge Protocol" client to be installed and selected on each physical NIC you wish to use.

[CarltonR]

 thank you, correction taken.

[da-Peter]

Hi,

a few more information. Host as well as Guest OS are set to DHCP for their network address. Unfortunately I don't have a LAN port on my laptop. I checked my physical wifi adapter and the VMware Bridge Protocol is installed and had a checkmark as well in front of it.

 

 

[CarltonR]

Have you checked that the VM is receiving the correct DHCP settings . . . 'command prompt - ipconfig/all' [IP address, subnet mask, default gateway, DNS]

[da-Peter]

Hmmm...

I think i narrowed it down. It seems to be an issue with the actual network I am connected to, in my case Wi-Fi network. When I connect my laptop to the wife hotspot of my phone, bridged works. If I am connected to a public WiFi in a hotel for example, it doesnt work. Is that normal?

[RMone81]

I found the same situation with my VMs, but at Windows 10.

It worked fine in the company.

But it is not anymore working at home! I use a FritzBox 7590 as DHCP, OS 7.29
Setting a static IP to the VM in the Routers IP range, makes it work.
Very strange!

[da-Peter]

Has anyone found a solution to this issue? No word from VMware whatsoever. Great support. Anything else I could try?

[RMone81]

The AVM Support wrote me this:

If I see it correctly in the submitted support data (thanks for that!), then the following entry is valid for both your laptop and your virtual machine: ...

In it can be seen that the DHCP requests of the virtual machine go to the FRITZ!Box via the MAC address of the laptop and thereby also the DHCP requests do not arrive correctly. IP address from the "emergency" range are used, in the VM probably no IP config is displayed at all.

In the FRITZ!Box there was no change regarding the DHCP assignment and also all your other numerous devices receive correctly an IP address via DHCP from the FRITZ!Box. It rather seems that your virtual machine has changed the way of logging on to the DHCP and therefore the automatic assignment does not work anymore. The best thing to do is to let the virtual machine become active once using a different MAC address.

If I made wrong assumptions or misunderstood something, please do not hesitate to get back to me as soon as possible in reply to this e-mail.

Kind regards from Berlin
 (AVM Support)

[phseven]

I have the same problem on a brand new latitude 3410. It's easy to reproduce and investigate. In my case the only way to get win11 connected is to add a second adapter NAT. So two adapters Bridge (automatic) and NAT must  be present in virtual machine settings. I dont' know why. Arch and freeBSD, I suppose all linux/unix vm, work fine with Bridge (automatic) only.

 

[perphilip1]

I think that windows 11 not allowed Bridge network but only NAT via vm-ware. Your second NAT adaptor was working but not your fixed IP  via Bridge!

[mmomani]

I have same issue exactly win11 host with VMWARE workstation 17.

I have a mix of Windows & Linux guests installed on my machine , every thing was working fine a couple of weeks ago but now Linux guests unable to get IP from my local DHCP server (Router) while all windows guests are able to get IP from Router!

Stuck since several hours trying to get it resolves with no luck, it is really weird issue why windows guests able to get IP from DHCP server while Linux not !!!

[Sloan31]

I just ran into this as well with Win10. Everything was working with workstation 17 when I first installed. When I upgraded to 17.0.1, that's when bridge networking broke. It works fine if I go back to 17.0.0. I have repeated the process numerous times so safe to say there's a problem in 17.0.1

[mmomani]

Same experience here, I have rolled the workstation back from 17.0.1 to 17.0.0 a couple of days ago and all issues got resolved, seems a bug in 17.0.1 has broken bridge connection of Linux Guests while windows guest bridge was not affected on 17.0.1 upgrade

[surfingjoe]

I just ran into the same problem, both on Windows 10 and Windows 11.

The bridged network no longer worked after I updated VMware Workstation from version 17.0.0 to version 17.0.1.  I uninstalled VMware Workstation and re-installed Workstation 17.0.0, and the bridged network worked once more!

Both incidents occurred using the same PC. I ran Windows 10 Pro initially when I ran into this problem a few weeks ago.  Today, I put a new disk as the primary boot disk and installed Windows 11.  All of the VMs are on another drive. So with Windows 11 installed on the same hardware, I ran into the same problem with version 17.0.1, which the issue resolved itself once I removed Workstation and installed VMware Workstation version 17.0.0.

In my case, I initially thought the problem was with Windows 11, but I found instead the problem was with the latest release of VMware Workstation version 17.0.1.

[marco_shaw]

I second this...  I went to 17.0.1 on Windows 11 and it's been going quite bad with regards to networking.  I'm going to try to downgrade.

[marco_shaw]

Actually, I went down to 17.0.0, and I'm still having problems.  17.0.0 was running great before.  So maybe I'm facing an issue inside the VM with the latest OS patches.  My VMs are all Windows Server 2022 with the latest patches, so I'll try something else.

EDIT: Ubuntu 22 using the same bridged networking seems to work fine with 17.0.0.

EDIT2: New Server 2022 VM installed and patched.  Tools installed.  Working.  It won't give me 22H2 to install though.

EDIT3: I guess 22H2 isn't a thing on Server 2022, at least that's not my problem.  I don't know anymore...

[marco_shaw]

At one point, I had problems getting updates from the Internet if they were over 100MB (time out, fail, etc.).  Smaller files seemed to be fine.

Oddly, https://us.cnn.com almost never seems to fail for me.

[Jjersey63]

Same issue - updated to 17.0.1 and now my home assistant vm is not accessible - I need bridge mode to work.

[Jjersey63]

OK - so all of my vm's are stored in folders outside of the install path.  I uninstalled 17.0.1 and preserved the license and some other configuration setting when prompted.  I uninstalled 17.0.1 ad reinstalled 17.0.0 - when I launched workstation my VM's were there - I ensured "Bridge Mode" was what Home Assistant (HA) network was configured for and then started the vm.  When HA started it was on the correct network and all was well again.

This is definitely a bug in the later version and needs to be fixed.

[symbols]

I also was only able to fix this after downgrading from 17.0.2 to 17.0.0

Here are the relevant details for me (giving generalities rather than specifics)

Adapter being bridged: Intel Wireless NIC
Host: Windows 11
Guest: Ubuntu 22.04

I tried unsuccessfully before downgrading:
- uninstalling VPN software from host
- ensuring bridge was set to only the specific adapter I wanted to use
- restarting vmnetbridge on the host

Downgrading immediately fixed the issue for me. This is unacceptable VMWare, do better.

[kstutsman]

I also was running into this, but was able to fix it in my case. For the record, downgrading to 17.0.0 did not fix it for me.

This may not apply to others, but in my case I am running VMware with Hyper-V compatibility. This was causing VMware to make the bridge connection connect to one of the Hyper-V virtual Ethernet devices I believe. In Workstation UI, go to Edit-> Virtual Network Editor, select VMnet0, and manually set which device it should bridge to. In my case because of Hyper-V, doesn't seem I can choose the actual Ethernet device, so I also had to go into Hyper-V manager and create a bridge network there which is what I selected in VMWare Workstation.

[maf123sp]

I run into the same issue. Since VM Workstation 17 I had this issue almost daily.

From my view, this issue is related to the network devices, which are used for the VMnet connectors.

On my computer approximately 15 network adapters are registers - most of them are virtual network adapters and only 3 are physical. Some of the virtual network adapters can't work in vmware - like HypeV network adapters. Using the "Virtual network editor" I can control, which network adapter to use for bridged networking. With the right settings it works fine.

BUT - after a reboot, after updates (windows and vmware) these settings are lost and I run again into the networking issues. In fact - I have this problem on a daily base and it is a mess.

Please try to store the selection in a persistent way. 

Matthias

[arangaran]

It seems that there is a bug related to VMWare Workstation for windows 17.0.1 and onwards, as some others have said one solution is to install 17.0.0, so who knows what has been changed or what is broken, but it has something to do with linux guests because it seems that it works well with windows guests, if this is ever solved i really hope someone could post here with which version it has been solved.

[gbohn]

I'm disappointed that this hasn't been fixed after all this time.

Has anyone tried the 'Tech Preview' to see if its been fixed there?

At this rate, it could be that the next version of Vmware Workstation doesn't have this fixed either...

[DKFJGWW]

After hours of doing everything and I mean I tried all you tried over and over plus more.  I fell back and punted.  Resigned that a fix-forward is not in our control, and is all on vmware to remediate.  17.0.2 NG.  17.0.1 IDK.  Too bad.  It was a new license purchase and first time install.  Leaves a sour taste.  Would have expected someone at VM to have addressed this already.

[DKFJGWW]

Thank you for requesting support from VMware.
Your Support Request Number is 23467808810
Commit Time: 2023-10-04 12:00 EDT
Severity of Support Request: 2 - High

As a customer of Complimentary Support entitlement, you should be hearing from the team within 77 business hours.

More information on the Support SLAs can be found here.

[DKFJGWW]

VMware support responds today that it will hopefully be fixed in 17.0.3

[DKFJGWW]

Verified as fixed in 17.5, as per release notes and testing after upgrade.

[maf123sp]

I've found an easy solution f this issue.

It happens after each reboot of the host system and after system updates. Every time I run into the issue, that the bridge mode is not working anymore. In such cases I open the Virtual Network Editor, goto Change Settings and press Automatic settings.

Here all network adapters of the host are listed. This list also includes several virtual network adapters, which are not working properly as base devices for the bridge mode. in my case I deselect all HyperV adapters. At the end only 3 adapters are selected:

- notebook physical adapter

- docking station physical adapter

- WLAN adapter

After submitting the changes I have to de-connect and to re-connect the guest machine and everything is working fine.

Matthias

[good pak]

Thanks, Matthias!

That solution worked perfectly.

Appreciate you sharing this!