Cannot connect to VMs hosted by VMWare Fusion

[brianduguid]

I primarily use VMWare Fusion for Chef/Cinc development, but I have been using UTM since I switched to Apple Silicon for situations in which I cannot get arm64/aarch64 builds of software. I have a file repository and other supporting VMs in Fusion to replicate our working environments. During development testing, a VM will download files from the file repository.

I am questioning my sanity now, but I was certain that my UTM VMs were able to connect to the Fusion VM file repository for download. However, I cannot get a route from a UTM VM to a Fusion VM when I ping or traceroute. I am able to connect to resources outside of my host Mac.

I am using the default Shared Network which results in an IP address of 192.168.64.2. The Fusion VM network is 192.168.240.0 and the file repository is 192.168.240.4. I have tried all other network modes with various modifications. None of them make it to the Fusion network and, in some scenarios, it made it worse, i.e. unable to ssh from host to VM.

I have tried reaching the Fusion VM from an OrbStack VM and that works as expected.

Is there a setting I need to enable or file to modify to allow me to access other vmnet networks?
I did a search for issues here, but the only related issue I had found was a PR (#6186) for joining another vmnet network. That sounds like that may solve my issue, is that going to be released?

Any guidance would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

• UTM Version: 4.4.5 (94)
• macOS Version: 14.5 (23F79)
• Mac Chip (Intel, M1, ...): Apple M3 Max

utm-debug.log

[brianduguid]

I have uninstalled UTM and OrbStack as well as cleaned out their data directories. I also cleaned out any other VM/Container software directories like Podman and Docker. I left VMware Fusion installed. I reinstalled UTM and configured an Ubuntu x86_64 VM. After boot, I was unable to connect to the Fusion network as described above while able to reach networks outside of the laptop. No joy.

I then tried the idea of connecting to the Fusion network for DHCP and connectivity. I retrieved the VNET_8_HOSTONLY_UUID value from /Library/Preferences/VMware Fusion/networking file.

On the same UTM VM, I removed the network configuration and manually added the following to the QEMU arguments:

-device
e1000,mac=EE:7D:68:BA:A0:C2,netdev=net0
-netdev
vmnet-host,id=net0,net-uuid=D776C97F-4A23-456F-9B14-114E63927055

Boot up had to wait for network configuration to timeout. An ip addr show indicates that an IP address is not assigned. No joy.

Re-inspection after of the uninstall/re-install of UTM.

• UTM Version: 4.5.3 (99)
• macOS Version: 14.5 (23F79)
• Mac Chip (Intel, M1, ...): Apple M3 Max

[osy]

I am using the default Shared Network which results in an IP address of 192.168.64.2. The Fusion VM network is 192.168.240.0 and the file repository is 192.168.240.4.

So it seems like the issue is that you're on different subnets. I believe both UTM and Fusion allows you to specify the subnet. What happens if you choose the same one?