VMware Server is totally free. All you need is just to register your name and address to obtain a number of serial numbers. You may get up to 100 serial numbers at a time. In VMware, there are 3 network types: bridge, nat, and host-only. Bridge is the most powerful one but you need an extra IP address. If you don't have one, you might be interesting in nat or host-only. Nat seems to be better to keep your guest OS up-to-date and connected to the internet. However, Nat means you can't connect to the guest OS directly from internet so you can't run it as a server. Anyway, it is possible to forward port to the guest OS behind VMware's nat.

Usually, the nat configuration will be stored in a file named nat.conf located in each VMware's network device. For example, my host OS has vmnet8 as a nat device so there is a nat.conf as follow.

/etc/vmware/vmnet8/nat/nat.conf

Port forwarding is in section incomingtcp and incomingudp. For example, I would like to ssh to the guest OS on port 22 through port 8022 on the host OS.

[incomingtcp]
8022 = 172.16.187.3:22

After that I have to restart VMware's network services as below.

/usr/lib/vmware/net-services.sh restart

So now I can ssh to the guest OS as follow.

ssh -p 8022 myhost.com

Tags: vmware, nat, port forward