Setting up and allowing Internet access via a proxy server to guest virtual machines in the VMware Workstation (or Player) is simple with the following steps. This guide explains how to share the host’s Internet connection which is connected via a Proxy server to the guest virtual machine inside the VMware Workstation. It can work on any host Operating system and VMware workstation as long as you have an Internet proxy server on your physical network. Obviously, you must know the IP address of your physical proxy server on the network.
When the host computer is connected to a physical Internet proxy server via the network cable or wireless network, the guest VMware virtual machine can access the internet with a NAT network connection type.
Internet Access to Guest VM Via Proxy Server in VMware
Setting up the Internet through NAT is very simple without any additional settings on the host or guest machine.
1) Make sure the guest OS network type is set to NAT.
In the virtual machine settings, check the network adapter properties.
Note: You will find identical screenshots on the latest VMware and Windows Operating system versions.
2) Leave the IPv4 address to obtain automatically in the guest machine. So, the guest virtual machine will get a non-routable IP address from the VMware workstation DHCP service. Verify the IP address of the guest OS.
3) Don’t bother about different ranges of IP addresses of guests and host physical networks. Still, your VMware guest machine can communicate to the host physical network adapter and the outside world by the NAT network mode.
We can confirm it by pinging the proxy server on the physical LAN.
In this example:
The IP address of the host computer: 192.5.2.51
Internet proxy IP: 192.5.2.53
But, my guest VM got a different IP range. Still, the guest machine can ping to the Internet proxy server now.
4) Now we can configure and use the same proxy server IP on the Internet browser in the guest machine.
(In Internet explorer, Tools -> Internet Options -> Connection -> LAN settings -> Proxy Server)
5) Internet will work on the guest virtual machine now. Even though your proxy server is allowing internet access to the host IP address only, it still can work without adding the guest IP address on the proxy server. Because the proxy server will detect that requests are coming from the physical host computer IP by VMware NAT technology.
This is the easiest method to give Internet access via a physical proxy server in VMware guest machine
Also, the guest VM can communicate to the Internet proxy server if you select the ‘Bridged’ network type. But, in this method guest virtual machine should have the same IP address range as the host machine assigned either manually or automatically. Then you have to add the IP address of the guest machine in the Internet proxy server settings/policies to allow Internet access which will have extra work if you are going to implement it in multiple virtual machines.
