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thanks for any help in advance.

  1. Problem: I have a desktop with VMware Workstation Pro installed. I have two NICs installed. I also have two routers/networks in my home office since my ISP provides me with static IPs. I want to have my primary NIC on my desktop go to one network and keep all the traffic there. I want the secondary NIC to be plugged into a separate router and have all the VMware Workstation traffic go there.

  2. How do I configure this in VMware Workstation to work as described above? Do I need any static route statements to make this work correctly? If so, can you give me an example with two different private subnets?

  3. Can I achieve this without having to purchase a router that does VLANs and Inter-VLAN Routing?

  4. My goal is for all the network traffic for my virtual machines to go 100% to one router, while any other traffic and work I do on my Desktop goes to a primary router.

Thanks again. The more details the better. I know the products very well, but Networking isn't my strong suit.

I didn't realize this until I posted it, should I have posted this on StackExchange instead of superuser? I thought that is what I was doing until I realized it wasn't. :/

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I assume your host OS is Windows. With bridged networking, this is relatively easy to achieve.

  1. Make Windows not use the secondary NIC unless required
    • You could disable all protocols (IPv4, IPv6) in the connection properties
    • You could make sure it doesn’t have a default gateway set
    • You could make it have a higher metric so its default gateway won’t be used
  2. In VMware Virtual Network Editor, select an unused virtual network
  3. Set this network to be bridged specifically to your secondary NIC
  4. Make your VMs’ virtual network adapters use this virtual network

If you want to do this with NAT, I’m not sure that’s even possible.

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  • Thanks for the response. Does this take into account using the two separate routers? I wasn't sure if that was a response to what you wrote. Thank you :)
    – user335185
    Commented Dec 8, 2020 at 11:33
  • Separate routers or not don’t really matter. All that matters is what the secondary NIC is connected. It could be the same network (for more bandwidth) or a different network.
    – Daniel B
    Commented Dec 8, 2020 at 11:51
  • Hi, sorry for the delay in responding to this question. I'm still trying to get this going. It's definitely Windows 10 for now. You mentioned disabling IPv4 and IPv6, but I still need Internet Acess. Was this just mentioned to have an isolated lab?
    – user335185
    Commented Sep 18, 2021 at 23:44

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