Network Adapters Stopped Working – "Connected" Option Grayed Out in VMware Workstation 17.5 on Ubuntu 24.04

[janbaztaimur]

Hi everyone,

I'm running VMware Workstation 17.5 on a host machine with Ubuntu 24.04. Recently, the network adapters in all of my virtual machines have stopped working.

When I go to the VM settings, the "Connected" checkbox for the network adapter is grayed out, and only the "Connect at power on" option is selectable. I've tried restarting both the host and the VMs, changing network adapter types (NAT, Bridged, Host-only), and reinstalling VMware Workstation, but nothing seems to fix the issue.

I also searched online and went through several community posts and troubleshooting guides, but couldn’t find a solution that worked.

Has anyone faced this issue before or have suggestions on what might be causing it?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance.

[RaSystemlord]

As "for any help", perhaps you could try to delete the current NAT adapter and create it again. Virtual Network Adapter is the tool for that. I have no idea why this happened - perhaps some 3rd Party software running there for security?

[janbaztaimur]

The issue was caused by the vmnet.ko kernel module not being loaded automatically at boot, which resulted in networking not working and the "Connected" checkbox being grayed out in VMware.

So...

Rebuilt and installed VMware kernel modules manually:

sudo vmware-modconfig --console --install-all
Verified vmnet.ko exists:

sudo find /lib/modules/$(uname -r) -name vmnet.ko
Manually loaded it:

sudo modprobe /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/misc/vmnet.ko
Confirmed it worked:
"Connected" became active, and lsmod | grep vmnet showed the module loaded.

Made it load automatically at boot:

echo vmnet | sudo tee /etc/modules-load.d/vmware.conf
Now everything works fine even after reboot.