I also have a similar problem on Workstation 7. Host is Windows 7 and guest is Ubuntu 9.10.

I did not have the problem through beta testing and faced to it on the product version. So, I downgraded to 7.0.0 build-197124(rc).

This isn't enough information to go on... If it's not the identical problem, what is different about it?

What sort of adapter are you bridging to?

Are you running any firewall or antivirus software?

Could you also provide some packet traces for us to look at?

Thanks for the traces. It looks like packets heading from the host to the guest are not being properly checksummed. We'll get an XP SP3 host up and running ASAP and see if we're able to reproduce this, because I have to imagine that our QA engineers spent time testing this...

Could you do me one more favor and look into what offloading options you've enabled on the bridge adapter (e.g., checksumming, TCP segmentation offloading aka TSO, etc.)? Does host/guest communication work properly when those offloading options are disabled? What adapter model/driver are you using, for that matter?

Thanks again,
Greg

I disabled "Offload Checksum" on the physical network adapter the guest is bridged to, and now everything works as it should!

Go to the device manager, and look for this setting in the properties of the bridged network adapter. (The setting in question may be named differently on your setup)

I hope this works for you guys having similar problems as well!

(My mainboard is an ASUS P5K Premium WiFI-AP, I'm using the onboard Realtek RTL8169/8110 Family Gigabit Ethernet NIC).

Yep, it looks like this is a regression. The logic that decides when to checksum packets changed between WS 6.5 and 7.0, and if we misdetect the offloading configuration of the bound adapter in WS 7.0, then the bridge is probably not going to do any checksumming at all.

I've filed a PR, so we'll get some developers looking at this. Thanks for bearing with me and providing us with useful feedback.

For all future visitors to this thread who are experiencing the same issue: please provide your NIC model and driver version, so that we can expand our hardware interop testing to watch for these failures in the future.

Thanks,
Greg

Have a similar problem with using NAT configured. Guest runs for a while without any problem and stops working suddenly. ping is still OK but no other network activity (no nslookup, no http, ...). Restarting the VM-guest does not help. Restarting the vm services (/etc/init.d/vmware) helps for a while. I also tried to disable the offload checksum using ethtool -k ... but this workaround did also not work.

Host:
SLES11: Linux testhost 2.6.27.19-5-default #1 SMP 2009-02-28 04:40:21 +0100 i686 i686 i
NIC1: Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82566DM Gigabit Network Connection (rev 02) (used for VM-networking)
NIC2: Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82572EI Gigabit Ethernet Controller (Copper) (rev 06) (disabled)
Driver: e1000e

Guest:
Win XP SP3 with all patches and antivirus program

Running the VM-guest in a VMware Workstation 6.5.3 with no problem.

Maybe helps finding failure
Peter