Virtualbox and VMware Workstation bridged networking on Windows

I use VMware Workstation for most of my virtual machines on my Windows development machine. However, I also like to use vagrant to manage development projects. While I could pay HashiCorp $80 to get vagrant to work with VMware Workstation, I don’t see the value. Vagrant works perfectly out of the box with VirtualBox.

So, VMware Workstation and VirtualBox need to cohabitate on the same machine

Mostly, they work fine together. But I found out the hard way that as soon as I installed VirtualBox, all of my VMware Workstation machines using bridged networking became disconnected. After some digging, I found the reason.

VMware Workstation automatically chooses the adapter to use for bridged networking. Once VirtualBox is installed, it apparently chose the ‘VirtualBox Host-Only Ethernet Adapter.’ Once you know this, it’s easy to fix.

The fix

1. From VMware Workstation choose Edit -> Virtual Network Editor...
2. At the bottom of the dialog, click Change Settings to elevate to administrator credentials
3. From the list at the top, choose the Bridged type virtual network
4. Under VMnet Information -> Bridged click Automatic Settings
5. Uncheck VirtualBox Host-Only Ethernet Adapter and click OK, OK