Hey! I know this is maybe better suited for a VMWare group, but I can’t find one with the whole Reddit fiasco. So I’m hoping someone can point me in the right direction or give a bit of advice.
I have VMWare Workstation 16 currently using NAT. This has been working well for a while, as whenever I need to open a port, I just manually do it one by one. But as I’ve been hosting game servers it’s becoming a bit tedious to do one by one and there’s not an option to open ports by ranges using NAT.
I read that Bridged is what is recommended for my use case. And I’ve tried this but can never get it to work. I’ve tried deselecting all but the main NIC too.
I rent a dedicated server, I only have access to one IP with the option to purchase a secondary IP. I’m guessing it’s because of this I can’t get Bridge to work, because I don’t have access to DHCP.
Is my only option to purchase a secondary IP, create a VM for PfSense and have that manage the DHCP? (That’s even if I’m understanding this correctly)
Or would installing something like EXSi achieve what I’m trying to do?
Many thanks in advance!
I think you might be misunderstanding what bridging and NAT are.
Network Address Translation (NAT) is a technology that allows one IP to have many IPs behind it, and those IPs will route through a specific (potentially virtual) machine to reach things on the internet (and vice versa). In the case of a VPS hosting VMs or Containers it allows you to have many different VMs and Containers share a single IP and therefore save IPs and money.
Bridging is effectively creating a switch, so every VM would be directly connected to whatever network is a being bridged (sounds like that would be the internet in this case)
On a VPS you would almost definitely want to be using NAT