macOS Big Sur Fusion 12 NAT no internet connection

[om3rx]

Hi,

Running latest macOS Big Sur with Fusion 12. Nothing changed in my virtual machine Windows 10 however internet connection is not working

[Oscar-n]

I have the same problem.

Big Sur with Fusion 12, no internet access.

VMWare need to fix this.

[ScotchRocket]

I had the same issues.  None of my 3 Win10 VM's could get an internet connection over NAT after I upgraded to Big Sur.   Last week, I had to rebuild my Mac from scratch (erase the drive, rebuild by hand, no Time Machine restore).    I installed Fusion (ver 12.1) and NAT was suddenly working.   I even have one VM that uses the Cisco VPN and it works just fine over NAT.  

I didn't build new VM's, just used the old ones that were not working previously.   The scratch build of the Mac seemed to fix whatever was wrong with my old upgraded build.  I suspect the macOS upgrade process isn't the best as I was having very strange issues with other parts of my system that all cleared up with the fresh install.

[Malte1511]

Non of the solutions worked for me, any suggestion?

[tlessard]

I'm in the same boat. Was upgrading a piece at a time out of Catalina; newest AnyConnect VPN client, upgrade to Fusion 12, then upgrade to Big Sur and boom. Broken shared connection/NAT. WTF VMware?  

[techmonster11]

Have you installed 12.1 update? It fixes a bunch of things, but it also has some known issues with Big Sur if you have VPN connections in your network stack for MacOS, it has trouble connecting to the host network. https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Fusion/12.1.0/rn/VMware-Fusion-1210-Release-Notes.html

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[tlessard]

Yes indeed, installed Fusion 12.1 prior to OS11 upgrade. No further available updates. I'm trying to build and test new client images remotely, and this makes that impossible. The work around on my tools VMs is to install the AnyConnect client and connect directly after login, but that doesn't work when I need to log an image build into an already connected network. I wouldn't have upgraded yet if I'd had any idea VMware released an inferior product that loses functionality. And what's worse is that we paid to lose it! SMH    

[firmicus]

Same here, I have the latest Fusion 12.1, this is really a major issue for me.

[jackbenfu]

Same problem here...

Conversion from VMWare 11 to 12 somehow changed the network configuration of my Windows 10 VM... A proxy was added to my network settings as you can see in the attached screenshot.

Disabling proxy fixed the problem for me.

Hope this will help some of you.

[tlessard]

No such luck for me. My Win 10 VMs are still set to auto. Toggling setting had no effect. Still having to run my tools VMs in autodetect mode and VPN each VM to gain home office network connectivity.  

[bzdura]

I made another big mistake of my life ...yeap...upgraded for Fusion 12 and then to Big Sur and as you suppose my VMs are f... up from network point of view. I have connection (pings, dns queries and so on - even curl is working well) but web browsers are not working (almost) at all.

I found a quick solution which works for me - when I connect to VPN from my guest Kali everything works fine - web browsers and so on.

When Im disconnected from VPN (on guest) situation back normal (I mean abnormal because its another crap form VM company) and web browsers are not working.

[MiLo8]

I'm on Big Sur 11.2 and Fusion 12.1, using a Win10 VM, and my networking was half-broken after upgrading to Big Sur.  That is, I could browse the Web and use some apps that utilized the Internet (such as Outlook), but then other apps refused to work (Wrike, Dropbox), and some were half-functional (OneDrive, certain websites).  Switching the VM to use NAT ("Share with my Mac" under Virtual Machine > Network Adapter > Network Adapter Settings…) worked, but only after waiting about 30 seconds.  Until then, Windows didn't seem to notice that it was on the network and had Internet.  After the panel slid in from the right asking me if I was on a public or private network (I chose "private", but it shouldn't matter, right?), everything was fully functional.  Just thought I would mention this in case some users (like me) are expecting that a change in the VM's networking settings would take effect immediately.

[Malte1511]

Gave it multiple tries and more then enough time to readjust and update internally I even tried multiple time schedules.

1. 15 sec. no impact
2. 30 sec. no impact
3. 45 sec. no impact

I as well tried the terminal commands and new uninstalls and new installs, the only thing I did not try so far is a BigSur clean install and a fresh install of Fusion - This is no option!

Sorry, that was my 1st try 😩 as well.

Meanwhile I keep watching this post and moved my Fusion VM to a different virtualization tool - Works fine with NAT, VPN and all I need for the moment on BigSur. Maybe once they get it fixed I will return to Fusion currently Fusion is not usable for me with this "feature" in place. 

[tomeq82]

Same thing here - none of the connection types work for VMs under Fusion 12 and BigSur, all latest versions. NAT doesnt work, bridged work half way - while I can resolve names, ssh using putty and using IP addresses, browsers and ANY OTHER TOOLS working over sort of HTTP/HTTPS gives "ssl protocol error" or basically doesn't work at all. 

Eg. webpages doesn't appear or are broken like here:

[tomeq82]

Exactly I have the same impression - internet connection works for like 30 seconds after machine booting. Windows, Linux. Doesn't matter. It looks like something kills the network on the host side.

[ociri24]

same here.... 

It just works sometimes when I set the network to WLAN Bridge.... but don't know why

[tomeq82]

I have found totally ridiculous but working fix:

create openvpn connection from guest VM to your home network router and configure it to pass every traffic via this tunnel. This bypass host networking and apparently is the only way to allow networking for host VMs..... 

[jboles_cmu]

I also have seen this problem, and (for me at least) it's definitely related to the Cisco Anyconnect VPN. 

System details: 2020 MacBook Air (Intel), Big Sur 11.2.1, Fusion 12.1.0, AnyConnect 4.9.04053, vpn mode = split (only certain IP ranges get routed to utun2)

Guest VM network works as expected until I connect to VPN, after which VM loses "external" connectivity (internet and vpn destinations).  Could still ping private subnet (192.168.91.1 is the host bridge100 for me, this acts as DHCP/DNS server for guests).  Behavior same for Windows/Linux/FreeBSD guests.

The fix was really close to this thread:  Share host VPN with guest , but rather than pfctl to the anchor "com.apple.internet-sharing/shared_v4", it only worked when applying to the default pf table (don't specify any -a parameter).  After applying the pfctl nat fix, the guest VM can reach both the internet and the private subnets (no VPN client within the VM).  I'll post more technical details to that thread.

Still looking for an easy "undo" after disconnecting from the VPN... currently have to reboot the guest VM (or pause/resume then renew DHCP)

[haagbard]

This was the solution that worked for me as well. Hade the same setup (Bug Sur, Fusion 12.1, AnyConnect, split vpn) and applying the NAT rule to the default pf table worked.

Comparing the default pf table with a friends table (that has a working NAT), we noticed that he had two more entries in the default pf table:

sudo pfctl -s nat 2>/dev/null                   
nat-anchor "com.apple/*" all
nat-anchor "com.apple.internet-sharing" all
rdr-anchor "com.apple/*" all
rdr-anchor "com.apple.internet-sharing" all

Compared to mine (not working):

sudo pfctl -s nat 2>/dev/null                   
nat-anchor "com.apple/*" all
rdr-anchor "com.apple/*" all

 By adding 

nat-anchor "com.apple.internet-sharing" all 

rdr-anchor "com.apple.internet-sharing" all

to mine, the VM works again with NAT (except DNS via default gw, had to manually set that to real DNS server). 

[haagbard]

By editing /etc/pf.conf and rebooting the host, NAT is now working even across reboots of the VM. 

[redhatter9]

I have the identical problem. Could you please elaborate how you loaded the two additional anchors and persisted them? For me the nat rules appear fine in com.apple.internet-sharing/shared_v4.

nat-anchor "com.apple.internet-sharing" all 
rdr-anchor "com.apple.internet-sharing" all