VMWare Fusion for Mac with a specific IP address for the guest OS

At one of my clients I need to run a VMWare VM on my Apple MacBook.

After much pain and messing around, the problems I had with getting the network of the guest O/S working were related to VMWare and the guest O/S’s fixed IP address.

Even if you set VMWare to NAT mode, it will not notice the fixed IP that the guest O/S is using. What you have to do is change the DHCP and NAT settings of DHCP to use the correct subnet you want, and the correct IP address. You do this by changing the “/Library/Application Support/VMWare Fusion/vmnet8/dhcpd.conf” and “/Library/Application Support/VMWare Fusion/vmnet8/nat.conf” files, so that there is a single IP address in the DHCP range (end of range MUST be start+1).

You then ALSO have to edit the file “/Library/Application Support/VMWare Fusion/locations”  to change the value of – wait for it – VMNET_HOSTONLY_HOSTADDR to the IP subnet you want the “static” IP to be on.

This last step took me a long time to work out, not least because the variable name makes no sense with using NAT mode.