Issue: My Workstation 9.0.2 guests using NAT are seeing the physical network connection state of the host, where in Workstation 7 the guests always saw a "live" network connection regardless of whether the host was connected.
I had been using Workstation 7 on Ubuntu 10.04 for many years without issue. Most of my guests are Windows XP SP3, but I also have a couple that are Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7. In workstation 7, any time I had my NAT network turned on, the guest saw a "connected" live network connection. It didn't matter if the host was on a wired network, a wireless network, or no network at all -- the guest always saw that the network was up. This is how I would expect a NAT network to work.
I recently rebuilt my computer with Ubuntu 12.04 and Workstation 9.0.2. I copied all of the guests over from my old installation as-is. Now, when I have my guests running with the NAT network connected, if I disconnect the host's network connection, the guest connection gets disconnected as well. That is, in my guest, windows reports that the network cable has been disconnected.
This is especially problematic for me because I use VPNs and WebEx in my guests. I am often on low quality wifi networks, and I sometimes have to move between different rooms very quickly and my network connection will drop for even the shortest of times (one or two seconds). In Workstation 7 this wasn't an issue because the guests always saw a "live" network connection so the VPN or WebEx would just think that the network got "slow" for a few seconds, it would retry the dropped packets, and once the host was back online it would just move on with life. The worst you would see is a two or three second lag in the guests then it was back to normal.
In Workstation 9 this is a big issue because when the network on my host blinks even for a second, the guest sees a network disconnect, takes a few seconds to process that, reports the disconnected network to the VPN, the VPN goes into a "reconnecting" state, then the OS brings the network back online, then the VPN has to wait to time out, then it tries to re-establish the connection -- and all of this can take two minutes or more. When your network blinks a couple times an hour and you have to wait up to two minutes every time for everything to re-establish, you can see how this would be very frustrating.
I do not believe a guest NAT network should replicate the physical connection state of the host. I can't say for sure if this is a result of the host upgrade or the Workstation upgrade -- I have not had a chance to do extended testing yet. Has anyone else seen this, or do you have any ideas on what to try? I have already unchecked the box under 'Bridged Connection' labeled "Replicate physical network connection state" even though I am not using a bridged network, just to see if that would help - and it did not.
Thanks in advance,
-ben
Details:
Host: Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS 64bit alternate, fully patched as of 15 August 2013
Guest 1: Windows XP SP3 32bit, fully patched as of 15 August 2013, vmware tools 8.4.2, build-261024
Guest 2: Windows 7 Enterprise SP1 64bit, fully patched as of 15 August 2013, vmware tools 9.2.3, build-1031360