Setting a Static IP for an Ubuntu 18.10 VM in VMWare Fusion 10

I recently setup a new laptop and a new Ubuntu VM. I have a static IP setup for my VMs so I can ssh into them with an SSH host alias.

For some reason, how this works has changed since last I set this up, and this was a huge pain. Here’s what worked:

Network Settings.png

I explicitly added a new custom network adapter. VMWare fusion assigned it the subnet IP of 192.168.77.0

You can verify this by checking /Library/Preferences/VMware\ Fusion/networking: 

answer VNET_2_HOSTONLY_NETMASK 255.255.255.0
answer VNET_2_HOSTONLY_SUBNET 192.168.77.0
answer VNET_2_NAT yes
answer VNET_2_NAT_PARAM_UDP_TIMEOUT 30
answer VNET_2_VIRTUAL_ADAPTER yes

In the same directory, vmnet2/nat.conf has more helpful info: 

[host]

# NAT gateway address
ip = 192.168.77.2
netmask = 255.255.255.0

Alright. So now we can setup the VM with an IP. 192.168.77.10 was chosen arbitrarily.

In theory you can do this with nmctl, but I couldn’t grok it.

In theory you can do this with nmctl, but I couldn’t grok it.

And boom, this works.

Things I tried before I couldn’t get working:

  • Setting a static IP on vmnet1 or vmnet8

  • Setting the static IP via /etc/network/interfaces