Can I connect a virtual machine to an adhoc network hosted on the host machine?

Question

I have created an adhoc network on my laptop, to this network i can connect other computers but the virtual machine won't connect to it and i don't know why, I can't ping the guest machines from the host machine when I'm only using the ad-hoc network, even though i can ping other external physical computers connected to this ad-hoc network.

However if I connect my machine to a router then the virtual machine connects properly and I can ping the host machine from it or the guest machine from the host one. Virtual machine is set on Bridged network adapter mode (Not NAT).

I suspect that I need to virtualize a router for the adhoc network so that I can connect the Virtual Machine to it, but honestly I don't know if that's even possible, help?

I'm using Vmware Workstation if that matters, my goal is to connect external virtual machines and local virtual machines to the same network, without the use of a physical router and without the use of cables, is this possible?

Answer 1

This article at VMWare support site says:

By default, the VMnet0 virtual network is set up in bridged mode and bridges to one of the active Ethernet adapters on the host computer. The choice of which adapter it uses is arbitrary. You can restrict the range of choices using options on the Automatic Bridging tab.

Thus, you need to pick your wlan adapter as the hosts counterpart of a bridge (see "Configuring Bridged Networking Options on a Windows Host" in that article)