osx - VMWare Fusion access guest vm (windows) from host (mac)

06
2014-04
  • Tyler Jones

    I am needing to access the localhost of a guest windows 8 vm from my Mac OS (10.9) host. The windows 8 vm is running in VMWare Fusion. How can I do this?
    I have tried getting the guest ip address with ipconfig, and then typing that IP address into the browser on my mac, but it won't connect, and i can't ping that ip address from the mac either.
    I have tried doing this in both NAT and Bridged networking modes in VMWare Fusion.

    • Answers
  • Tyler Jones

    I have found what I needed to do here. To connect to localhost of the guest os firstly:

    • make sure the network settings of the windows vm in vmware fusion are set to: NAT (Share with my mac)
    • Turn off windows firewall for guest or public networks in windows 8 (just search for windows firewall and select "Turn Windows Firewall on or off")
    • get the ip address of the windows vm by opening a command prompt and typing "ipconfig"

    Once you have done these things, you should be able to switch to the mac os, and navigate the windows ip address in a web browser.


    • Related Question

    osx - VMWare Fusion - Running Windows Natively From A Bootcamp Partition on OS X
  • Goober

    I have a copy of OS X Leopard running on a partitioned hard drive. The other partition has a copy of Windows XP running on bootcamp. As a result of this I can boot into either Windows xp OR Mac OS X natively.

    I want to be able to run them both at the same time which i've been told can be doing using VMWARE Fusion..

    My question is, how do i go about doing this once I have a copy of VMWare Fusion?


    • Related Answers
  • The Tentacle

    From the Getting started manual:

    To create a virtual machine from the Boot Camp partition

    1. From the Virtual Machine Library window, select Boot Camp partition, which is automatically detected, and click the run arrow.
    2. Enter your Mac password to access the Boot Camp partition. You must have administrator privileges to use the Boot Camp as a virtual machine. VMware Fusion creates a virtual machine from your Boot Camp partition and starts Windows.
    3. After Windows boots from your Boot Camp virtual machine, VMwareFusion starts the installation of VMware Tools to enable full virtual machine functionality and optimize performance for your Boot Camp partition when used as a virtual machine. Follow the onscreen instructions and restart your virtual machine when prompted.
    4. When the VMware Tools installation is complete, reboot your computer. The first time you power on your Boot Camp virtual machine after installing VMware Tools, you will need to reactivate Windows.

    Works fine, though sometimes a second copy of the bootcamp item appears in the selector menu, this is harmless. Virtualised XP is great!

    Note Parallels also allows integration with Bootcamp, and it may be possible though seems not well supported in Virtualbox...