VMWare Fusion guests with a static IP

It's not straightforward to assign static IP addresses to guests in VMWare Fusion, and the article from which I took my instructions has been removed, and lives on only in Google caches and the like. Since I don't want to lose this information, I'm reposting the technical content here. Thanks to the original author, Gary Day, for his research.

Gary, if you're reading this and want me to link to your canonical original version under a new URL, please contact me and I'll sort it out.

Gary's original content appears below. Apologies for the slight formatting issues, it's a kupu-n-paste job.

Guest Configuration Information

Open a Finder window and navigate to your Virtual Machines folder, probably /username/Documents/Virtual Machines. Locate the VM package for the guest you want to use for this procedure (Virtual Machines are represented by a single file which is a package containing multiple disk and configuration files).
CTRL-CLICK the Virtual Machine and select “Show Package Contents”, this displays the components of your Virtual Machine. Find Guest.vmx (in my case “UbuntuGnome.vmx”), CTRL-CLICK again and open with your text editor (in my case TextMate, can’t live without it). This action will show the default configuration of “UbuntuGnome”. Search this text file for “ethernet0.generatedAddress” and you fill find the following (similar) information:

ethernet0.generatedAddress = "00:0c:29:8b:a4:4f"

This is your Virtual Machine’s “MAC” or Ethernet Hardware Address.
Copy this information to a text file because I doubt most people can remember such things for more than a second or two.

Accessing VMWare Fusion’s DHCP Settings

VMware Fusion’s DHCP configuration file is located in “Application Support”.
Open a terminal and set a command to open this config file in your text editor of choice.

~ user$ mate "/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/vmnet8/dhcpd.conf"

This is what you should see:


# Configuration file for ISC 2.0b6pl1 vmnet-dhcpd operating on vmnet8.
#
# This file was automatically generated by the VMware configuration program.
# If you modify it, it will be backed up the next time you run the
# configuration program.
#
# We set domain-name-servers to make some DHCP clients happy
# (dhclient as configued in SuSE, TurboLinux, etc.).
# We also supply a domain name to make pump (Red Hat 6.x) happy.
#
allow unknown-clients;
default-lease-time 1800; # 30 minutes
max-lease-time 7200; # 2 hours
subnet 172.16.27.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
range 172.16.27.128 172.16.27.254;
option broadcast-address 172.16.27.255;
option domain-name-servers 172.16.27.2;
option netbios-name-servers 172.16.27.2;
option domain-name “localdomain”;
option routers 172.16.27.2;
}


Note the subnet range, we need to set a fixed address for our Virtual Machine outside of this range.
We do this like so:
Append the open file (dhcpd.conf) with the following, obviously using your own settings including the Ethernet Hardware Address you previously copied to a text file, the name of Guest.vmx and the IP address you wish to assign to this Virtual Machine.

host UbuntuGnome {
hardware ethernet 00:0c:29:8b:a4:4f;
fixed-address 172.16.27.20;
}

Save this file, you will prompted to enter your administrator password as we have opened dhcpd.conf as a read only file in TextMate.

We now need to restart networking for VMWare Fusion:

sudo "/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/boot.sh" --restart

Configuring Hosts In Linux Guest

That’s a confusing title I must admit.
Fire up your Virtual Machine..
NOTE:
I am using this Ubuntu Guest as it was a machine already on my system, the following configuration information will differ slightly between distros and interfaces. For my “Micro-Network” experiments I will be using minimal, command line installations of CentOS 5.02 and I will cover this in later posts.

If you are using the Gnome Desktop navigate to:

System> Administration> Network

Use your superuser password to unlock the network applet and select “Wired Connection (Properties)”.
Disable roaming mode (it’s set this way by default on a new Ubuntu installation) and enter the settings for Configuration (Static IP Address).

IP ADDRESS: (The Address You Set In The VMWare DHCP Settings)
SUBNET: (Usually 255.255.255.0)
GATEWAY: (The Address Of The VMware Fusion Server)*

* “option routers XXX.XX.XX.X” in dhcp.conf

Save these settings and restart networking (or your Virtual Machine).

This procedure can repeated for each Virtual Machine you want to add to your “Virtual Network” by adding a host entry for each guest machine in “/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/vmnet8/dhcpd.conf”.