I just spent 20 minutes trying to figure out why the network in my VMware Workstation-hosted VM was dead. The VM was using bridged networking, but was unable to reach even the host. After trying everything under the sun I finally ended up in the virtual network editor. Turns out that VMware had bridged with none other than the ‘VirtualBox Host-Only Ethernet Adapter’. D’oh!

Fortunately the fix was easy. Open up the Virtual Network Editor, either from Edit -> Virtual Network Editor. from within VMware Workstation, or directly from the Start menu. Under the Automatic Bridging tab, add the VirtualBox adapter to the list of excluded adapters.

For good measure I went in to VirtualBox to make sure that it didn’t encounter the same issue. VirtualBox seems smart enough to distinguish between the physical and virtual adapters on the system (VMware adds 2 virtual adapters), as only the physical adapters are in the list of interfaces to bridge to.