Unable to SSH or Ping VMWare Workstation Virtual Machine

I tried to SSH into a linux VM running in VMWare Workstation on my Windows 8.1 laptop only to find that I was unable to access any of my virtual machines. The strange thing was that I could access host machine resources from within the VMs.

Changing from NAT to Bridged didn't solve the problem. Moving to 'Host Only' didn't work either. In all cases I had the same behavior: The VM could access the host in all instances, but the reverse would not work.

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I tried to SSH into a linux VM running in VMWare Workstation on my Windows 8.1 laptop only to find that I was unable to access any of my virtual machines. The strange thing was that I could access host machine resources from within the VMs.

Changing from NAT to Bridged didn't solve the problem. Moving to 'Host Only' didn't work either. In all cases I had the same behavior: The VM could access the host in all instances, but the reverse would not work.

Solution & Commentary

I gave it some thought and realized that sometime in between installing VMWare workstation and firing up this particular virtual machine that I had installed Visual Studio 2013 for windows phone app development. VMWare didn't like the HyperV which was installed to facilitate the windows phone simulator so I disabled the Hyper-V role. Maybe this had something to do with it? I'm not sure.

At any rate, I was able to solve the problem by using the Virtual Network Editor and creating a totally new NAT network and switching over my VM to use it.

Here are the specific steps I followed:

• Open Virtual Network Editor
• Mark the existing NAT network as 'host only' (since there can only be one NAT network at a time)
• Created a new network (VMnet2 in my case) and marked it as NAT
• From within VMware Workstation I edited the virtual machine settings and selected VMNet2 as the network
• Rebooted the VM (just to be superstitious)

Once I did that I was able to resume bi-directional networking between the host computer and the VMs.

Solution & Commentary

I gave it some thought and realized that sometime in between installing VMWare workstation and firing up this particular virtual machine that I had installed Visual Studio 2013 for windows phone app development. VMWare didn't like the HyperV which was installed to facilitate the windows phone simulator so I disabled the Hyper-V role. Maybe this had something to do with it? I'm not sure.

At any rate, I was able to solve the problem by using the Virtual Network Editor and creating a totally new NAT network and switching over my VM to use it.

Here are the specific steps I followed:

• Open Virtual Network Editor
• Mark the existing NAT network as 'host only' (since there can only be one NAT network at a time)
• Created a new network (VMnet2 in my case) and marked it as NAT
• From within VMware Workstation I edited the virtual machine settings and selected VMNet2 as the network
• Rebooted the VM (just to be superstitious)

Once I did that I was able to resume bi-directional networking between the host computer and the VMs.