Enable VMware MAC Bridging

Issue:

If you try to MAC bridge a host-only VMware network interface with another interface on a Windows platform like this:

you'll get an error like this:

"VMware Virtual Ethernet Adapter for VMnet1 cannot be part of the Windows Network Bridge, because it may be incompatible with your local network. Please see http://vmware.com/info?id=68 for more information."

What happens is that MAC bridge is disabled by default on VMware network interfaces. In order to enable it, you must edit some registries as described on this KB article.

The article describes how to search through registries to find the right subkey for a specific VMware network interface, and add a registry value to enable MAC bridging for it. If it's a one time thing, you can do it manually, but if you do this on quite a few machines, it's getting pretty annoying.

So I've made a small Windows batch script that automatically searches the registries to find the equivalent subkey for each VMware network interface, and after the search is finished, you can type in the number of the VMware network interface you want to MAC bridge (i.e. for interface "VMware Network Adapter VMnet1" you would type 1) and press Enter.

Download:

• Enable_VMware_Bridging.zip (last change: 8/26/2015)

Note: Do not confuse Windows MAC bridging with the bridged networking used for virtual machines.