Windows Host - disable vmware nat & bridged network

[Muzz]

Hi There,

I am looking for a way to disable the bridged and nat networks for vmware guest operating systems - so that any guest operating system will have the host-only network available.

The reason for this is that our desktop environment is locked down and there is a requirement to provide some users with a test environment that is completely isolated from the production network.

Does anybody know if this is possible?

Regards

Murray

[RDPetruska]

Sure, you can disable and/or remove the VMnet8 adapter, disable the vmnat service, and remove the VMware Bridge Protocol service from any host NICs.

[Peter_vm]

But is also easy to put those items back on

[RDPetruska]

Not if the users don't have rights. And my assumption here, if they are creating a "locked-down environment", is that the users won't have rights.

[Muzz]

Yeah, that's right - the users are not local administrators of their machines so disabled services should remain disabled

I didn't know about the bridging driver that was installed on the nic so thanks for the pointer.

I take it that in the virtual network editor, automatic bridging will always choose a physical nic to bridge to VMNet0 (it's always enabled) - its just that not having the vmware bridge protocol on any nic will efectively disable the bridging...

Do you know if any of the VMWare networking is configurable at Installation? The installation needs to be an automatic deployment of the package so I either need to explicitly tell the package not to install the bridge protocol & nat service or alternatively write a script to remove the protocol and disable the service.

Has anybody ever done this before?

Regards

Murray

[kelaniz]

I need to know this as well, or preferably, a way to stop the VMNet1 and VMNet8 adapters from being created on install, period.