VMware Host-Guest intermittent communication on bridged mode

Question

I'm running 2 VMs (Unbuntu & Ubuntu Server), both of them are on bridged mode. The host is a Win7 running VMware Workstation 7. My purpose is to set up a PostgreSQL server on the Ubuntu Server VM, but i can't connect from host to the guest server.

• Pinging Host from any VM shows Destination Host Unreachable.
• Pinging Guest Vm's from Host, i get intermittent responses mixed with timeouts

I've disabled all firewalls for this test, both VMs have connectivity with internet and between them. I can also ping succesfully from any other machie on the subnet, the access point pings ok, but host<->guest is impossible.

The weirdest thing is that while i'm pinging guest VMs from host and i get the intermittent responses, sometimes i can connect with the postgresql DB, but only while i'm getting the responses from the ping.

Routing is OK, i'm bridging over a wireless NIC... ask me for any other data needed

Answer 1

Short answer is, don't bridge over wireless if you can avoid it. Also, you can add a second network interface for your VMs, and connect it to the host-only network. Use that for your host->guest communication, and the bridged interface for everything else.

I'm surprised bridging over a wireless NIC works at all. Apparently VMWare supports that in the latest version. It most likely implements some type of level3 forwarding. My guess is that it's having trouble capturing the packets that are being sent out over the wireless NIC, and handling them like incoming packets by forwarding them to the VM. That could be hardware/driver dependent, or just a bug in VMWare's implementation.