Host unable to communicate with guest machines and vice versa

[johnnydav]

Hi,

I have VMware Workstation 15, and I have Windows 10 pro installed on the host computer.

For some strange reason the host computer is unable to communicate with any of the guest machines and vice versa, nor matter what OS they have loaded.

So, here what I have setup:

On the Virtual Network Editor of Workstation I have setup a VMnet0 to be bridged to the host's physical network interface.

My router has the network of 192.168.0.1-254/24, and my virtual machines have ips within that same subnet.....(eg: one of them have Windows 2012 R2 and its ip is 192.168.0.111/24).

So, within the "Settings" of all these virtual machines I have selected the "Custom" option for the network and then selected VMnet0 for all of them, so they can point to the host's network.

On all these VMs I am able to ping the gateway, have internet, and I can also ping all the rest of the VMs without any problem, but strangely I cannot ping the host nor any other asset that is not "virtual". Also, if I try to ping from the host another physical computer within the same network I am NOT able to ping it either and vice versa. On the host OS I have disabled the firewall, antivirus.

Also on the Windows 2012R2 VM I have permanently disabled the firewall as I need it that way.

Have anyone faced this kind of weird thing? How could I resolve this problem and what if keeping me from being able to communicate back and forth, from host and VMs?

If you need anymore information please let me know.

Thank you

[yanw · Accepted solution]

In most cases, this issue probably is caused by the software installed on your host, you can check wether you have installed third-party software about virtualization or networking. Try to uninstall them and verify

[johnnydav]

I have checked and the only hypervisor I have installed is VMware Workstation and no networking software except the intel drivers for the network interface.

[johnnydav]

It turns out there was a process called PeerBlock that was actually blocking the outgoing traffic from Host to guest machines.

and when I killed that process the problem was resolved, but I was still not able to ping from guest to host and it was the firewall on the host side that also was blocking the inbound traffic from the guest machines (I can assure I did check on the inbound traffic by disabling the host firewall before but,, anyways maybe I did not check properly). So, I created a rule on the host's firewall and the  problem is resolved.