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The sections below detail known issues with using VMware discovered by the IS&T Vmware release team during testing. Additional known issues provided by VMware can be found in the Release Notes for each product. For details, see the VMware Workstation 6.0.x Release Notes and Vmware Fusion Release Notes.
Sometimes after updating VMware tools on a guest, networking is offline. We don't know why this sometimes happens, but the easiest work-around is to reboot the guest.
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The code that Red Hat Linux uses to discover network interfaces at boot time can produce some difficult to interpret behavior under VMware. Red Hat Linux records the ethernet interface hardware address (also called the MAC address). Every time it sees a new MAC address it moves aside the old network configuration, and creates a new one which completely ignores any network settings previously used, and instead uses DHCP to set the IP address.
If you clone a VM, or if you copy it, or even if you move it to a different directory on the same host, the MAC address will changeThe network MAC address will change not only if you COPY your VM, or clone it, but also if you
MOVE it, even on the same host. This is because, unless you do extra hand configuration to set a MAC address explicitly, VMware will generate one that is a hash on the host ID, the location of the VM files, and a few other things. This will not be an issue for users who are using NAT networking, but may be an issue in Bridged networking if the guest OS puts the MAC address into the network configuration files (as often happens with Linux.)
Using the recommended NAT networking setup will hide the effects of this behavior. NAT already uses DHCP.
A setup with Bridged networking will appear to stop working. Red Hat Network will tell you that you have updates, but then not give them to you. Attempts to visit a web site will bring you to the MIT Network registration web page.
Any static IP address set, along with name servers will be ignored because the old config has been moved aside. A setup using DHCP will also stop working because the MAC address previously registered is no longer the one you are using.
A clever Linux wizard might delete the HWADDR entry from the configuration files hoping the network configuration will stay the same even if the MAC address changes, but that just causes the failure to happen at a random time in the future, for example after a kernel update that forces device rediscovery.
After you move or clone a Linux VM guest using Bridged networking, you will need to deal with a changed MAC address:
If you have a static IP address configured, go to System->Administration->Network and move all the configuration you will see for eth0.bak into eth0.
If you registered the VM guest for DHCP, you need to re-register.
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During installation VMware gives a warning about CPU speed : " VMware Workstation has measured your CPU speed to be 2394 MHZ, but Windows reports that it is 2401. This may mean that your computer has a power saving feature that varied the processor speed. As a result, the clock in your virtual machine may run too fast or too slow." See the attached screenshots. That explains why the time is off betwee host system and running virtual OS. This can be corrected by enabling the time synchronization option in VMware Tools.
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