Virtual Wireless Adapter

[adrianm]

Has anyone ever thought of having a virtual wireless adapter available in the workstation products to complement the virtual wired adapters already present.

There are occasions when I want to test or demo software with Wireless rather than wired adapters - I have had very limited success using real USB wireless adapters inside a VM.

Im thinking of something that would work in much the same fashion as the existing adapters allowing me to run bridged, NAT or host only. The adapter could be configurable to allow me to set virtual SSID, Mode, Signal Strength, Speed etc.... Could be based on a commonly used wireless technology such as PRISM/PRISM2.

I could then use a whole variety of wireless tools and software within a VM.

Maybe I am talking rubbish...what do others think?

Adrian

[AWo]

Fast thinking...

I guess it depends on which layer your configuration takes place. Imagine you have two guests, both use the same physical wireless through a virtual wireless adapter and both guests have different card settings (like signal stregth). I believe that at least this ends up in a conflict.

You can use wireless adapters already, even if they're not virtualized. But their use sticks to the configuration which is done on the host.

AWo

[adrianm]

Maybe I'm being naive here but I see the configuration as being purely virtual in terms of SSID, signal strength etc in that these are the things that are presented to the guest OS. A virtual Wireless should not have to be defined over a real wireless adapter in much the same way as a Virtual Ethernet can function over a resl wireless, wired, or even a dial up connection.

I see the purpose of the configuration as being able to present the guest wireless with a virtual view of the network it is connected to.

Adrian

[AWo]

Maybe I'm being naive here but I see the configuration as being purely virtual in terms of SSID, signal strength etc in that these are the things that are presented to the guest OS. A virtual Wireless should not have to be defined over a real wireless adapter in much the same way as a Virtual Ethernet can function over a resl wireless, wired, or even a dial up connection.

Ok, a missunderstanding. You're talking about the signal strenght presented to the user, I meant the signal power, which is a card configuration parameter.

I believe there's a lot of hardware which would someone (including myself) like to have virtualized. I assume that VMware's main concern is to get communication working over some kind of virtual adapter (in this case a virtual ethernet card) which can use most physical devices. Otherwise they could start to virtualize (and support) many kinds of adapters like ISDN cards, Fax cards, etc. (and maybe even some old ones like Token-Ring ) and that's maybe too much.

AWo

[Aldebaran]

Adrian,

I think this would be cool. One way to implement it is using a virtual device within the guest for a nework card similar to the virtual cdrom offered by VirtualCloneDrive. In the case you are mentioning, the virtual device would present a PRISM interface to the guest, and then these operations of the virtual network card could be redirected across a host-only interface to a virtual device server running on the host. The host would interpret and carry out the operations on behalf of the guest.

I've done a quick look on Google for such a beast, but I have not yet found anything. I did find a VxDWriter , but it is for Win 98. Perhaps there is a similar thing for Win NT,2K,XP.

Jeff