how can I access a webserver running on my NATed VMware Fusion guest from the rest of the subnet? [closed]

Question

I am not allowed to run my VMWare guest in bridged mode, and I want to somehow tunnel from an agreed port on the Mac's external network interface to the webserver running on the VMWare fusion guest.

My guess is that I can somehow set up a tunnel in the ipfw running on the Mac to support this.

Can anyone give me some pointers please ?

Answer 1

Disclaimer I haven't tried this but this is for workstation but I believe it should work

If you are running a virtual machine on your computer, you may want to access that virtual machine from another computer. Let’s use an example: Say you have an Ubuntu virtual machine with Apache running on port 80, and you want to show other people on your network to access the website you are hosting.

We’re going to assume that the virtual machine is using NAT, and has been assigned an IP address of 192.168.23.128.

First open the Manage Virtual Networks start menu item:

Click on the NAT tab, and then click on Edit. You will see the NAT Settings dialog:

Click the Port Forwarding button, and you will see this dialog:

Now we are finally on a screen we can actually use. We’re going to use port 8080 on the host machine. We enter the ip address for the ubuntu virtual machine, and port 80. These ports could be any ports.

We should be able to test this out by going to http://localhost:8080 on our host pc. We can give out the url to our host machine by replacing localhost with the host computer IP address.

EDIT:

If you're using NAT, the VM is behind a host level NAT address (172.x.y.z) that your Internet router knows nothing about. You could forward port 80 from the router to your host's IP, then configure /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/vmnet8/nat.conf to port forward port 80 requests to your VM's 172 address on port 80. This requires turning off Apache on OS X, if it's running because that would cause a port conflict.

Your other option, is to change the VM from NAT to bridged, in which case your OS X and your Ubuntu VM would be on same subnet with DHCP address handed out by the Internet router. The router would be forwarding traffic directly to the VM without any additional port forwarding.

Answer 2

I was looking to do the same on OSX (more specifically, allow phones/tablets/devices/people to access my VM for testing purposes) and the following worked perfectly:

My setup:

Host OSX IP: 192.168.1.72
VM IP:       172.16.67.188

Method:

1) Select “NAT” in “Network Adapter” settings on VMWare Fusion

2) cd to the vmnet8 directory

    cd /Library/Application\ Support/VMware\ Fusion/vmnet8/

Note: If you can't find the vmnet8 directory, try running locate nat.conf, which is usually where the file resides.

3) Edit the nat.conf file (using vim/vi etc) and underneath [incomingtcp], enter the following:

    EG: <external port number> = <VM’s IP address>:<VM’s port number>

In my case, I entered:

    [incomingtcp]
    8080 = 172.16.67.188:80

4) Save and exit the nat.conf file

5) Reboot VMWare networking by running:

    /Library/Application\ Support/VMware\ Fusion/boot.sh --restart

Upon running boot.sh, all tcp traffic to port 8080 on your OSX host machine will be immediately forwarded to destination port 80 of the virtual machine with IP 172.16.68.188 and make your VM available to your local network on 192.168.1.72:8080.

Note: If you're already running a webserver on OSX, conflicts might occur on port 80, so use 8080 (as I've shown here) or other port to avoid problems.