A dedicated IP in the requirement, because if you have the provision to allocate only 200 IP addresses to the machines on a network and you add a couple of Virtual Machines to the network you can’t expect it to share the IP address of the host network adapter. Let me explain each of the requirements clearly. VMware bridge protocol enabled for the host adapter.The host (physical computer) network adapter should be connected.A provision for allocating a dedicated IP for all the virtual machines.Before you continue reading this make sure you read the articles Components of VMware Network and Using VMware Network Editor (vmnetcfg.exe) The Requirements for a bridged network The advantage of this setup is all virtual machines can access the other physical computers on that network and the other machines can also access the virtual machines irrespective of the host computer’s firewall configurations. Bridged network setup is the easiest way to give virtual machine access to other machines on the network. In this article I’ll show you how to configure your VMware machines to work in bridged networking mode and some common problems that you might encounter while doing this. A dedicated IP is allocated to the virtual machine connected in bridged mode. VMware bridged networking is a type of network connection which allows the virtual machine to act as a unique machine on the network in which other physical machines exist.
