Issue:
You’ve installed VMWare Workstation on Vista or Windows 7 and the two VMNet adapters display as unidentified by the host OS. This causes your firewall profile to switch to the Public setting and lock down your computer even on a trusted network. Manually switching the virtual NICs to Private solves the problem only until the next reboot.
Cause:
The root cause has to do with the way Vista and Windows 7 automatically identifies network types. The information can be found on MSDN:
Windows Vista automatically identifies and monitors the networks to which a computer connects. If the NDIS_DEVICE_TYPE_ENDPOINT flag is set, the device is an endpoint device and is not a connection to a true external network. Consequently, Windows ignores the endpoint device when Windows identifies networks. The Network Awareness APIs indicate that the device does not connect the computer to a network. For end users in this situation, the Network and Sharing Center and the network icon in the notification area do not show the NDIS endpoint device as connected. However, the connection is shown in the Network Connections Folder. Also, if NDIS_DEVICE_TYPE_ENDPOINT is set, the Windows Firewall ignores the connection when Windows Firewall enforces public, private, or domain policies.
Solution:
NOTE: This solution will also work on Server 2008 when you have multiple NICs installed (aka: cluster or backup network).
Option 1
Important: This section, method, or task contains steps that tell you how to modify the registry. However, serious problems might occur if you modify the registry incorrectly. Therefore, make sure that you follow these steps carefully. For added protection, back up the registry before you modify it. Then, you can restore the registry if a problem occurs. For more information about how to back up and restore the registry, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
- 322756 How to back up and restore the registry in Windows
- Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
- Click the follwoing subkey:HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E972-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}
- Browse through the 00xx subkeys until you find the REG_SZ VMNet subkey with a value of either “\DosDevices\VMnet8” or “\DosDevices\VMnet1” (default values)
- On the Edit menu, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
- Type *NdisDeviceType, and then press Enter.
- On the Edit menu, click Modify.
- Type 1, and then click OK.
- Exit Registry Editor.
- Disable & re-enable the VMWare NICs
- DoneNote: In case simply disabling and re-enabling the virtual NICs doesn’t fix the problem immediately reboot your computer.
Option 2
If all this seems a bit confusing or you are unfamiliar with modifying your registry then you can download a powershell script that will automagically do the work for you.
Option 3
If you only use VMWare Workstation guests in a Bridged network then you can simply disable the NICs which will solve the problem all together.
This information was originally posted here…
Matt :: Oct.30.2008 ::
Microsoft, Virtual, Vista ::
3 Comments »
