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February 22, 2005
Networking a virtual server to its host
I've been working today on setting up a Virtual Server configuration for my presentation on Continuous Integration at the next Code Camp.
With VPC, it was straightforward to get connectivity between the virtual PC and the host. But, I couldn't understand why I wasn't even able to ping between the virtual node and the host. It turns out that it's not nearly as easy as you'd think. This is what I had to do:
- Create a loopback adapter as described in this KB article.
- Create a new virtual network attached to the loopback adapter.
- That gets connectivity between the virtual server and the host, but now you can't connect to the rest of your network.
John Howard suggests setting up Internet Connection Sharing, but the default ICS wants to set up a private network on 192.168.0.XXX, and that sub net is already in use for my normal internal network.
- Rather that try to figure out how to change that, I chose instead to configure a network bridge.
- However, when I selected the loopback adapter and the wireless adapter and created a bridge, I lost connectivity from the laptop. I couldn't even pull an IP from the DHCP server.
- It turns out that many notebook wireless adapters don't go into promiscuous mode normally. This Win XP Network Bridge article held the answer.
- Force the adapter into compatibility mode using "netsh bridge set a # e"
Now, both my notebook host and the virtual server see both the internal network and each other.
UPDATE: I was wrong. It looks like the network bridge won't work in this case. The virtual network refuses to show any of the bridged adapters in the 'Network adapter on physical computer' combo box.
I'll have to move the internal network to 192.168.1.XXX so that I can use ICS.
Posted by attili at February 22, 2005 07:20 PM