A couple of days ago, I set up a Windows 11 VM using VMware Fusion on my Macbook Air, and despite the janky and, at times, incredibly frustrating installation process (finding ISO files that will run on an ARM processor is shockingly difficult), I finally got it up and running with VMware tools installed. I like to use SSH (with SCP) to transfer files from my host operating system to my VMs, so one of the first things I did once the VM got set up was install OpenSSH using this Microsoft guide. I followed all of the steps without a hitch. Once it was set up, I could SSH into the VM from its command prompt, which I took to mean I had properly set everything up.
However, trying to SSH into the VM from my host Mac OS was a fail - no error message was displayed, just a lack of a response until the session timed out. There were no OpenSSH logs on the Windows VM from the time that I had tried to SSH into the VM, so I don't think that the VM is simply refusing connections. As far as I can tell, it is not a connectivity error; the VM reports being connected via virtual ethernet, and pinging the VM from my host OS was successful.
Part of the issue could be my inexperience with Windows and, furthermore the proper way to SSH into a Windows system. The aforementioned OpenSSH guide made it seem like ssh domain\username@ipaddress was the proper way to SSH into a Windows system and executing whoami on the Windows VM yielded something in the form desktop-<random_letters/digits>\<username>, which I assumed to domain\username, but maybe I misinterpreted? Oddly, running systeminfo | findstr /B /C:"Domain" yields a different result for the domain, but trying to SSH with the result from that command as the domain also didn't work.
Side Note
I also tried SSHing into the Windows VM from my virtual Ubuntu desktop and received identical results when I tried to SSH from my host Mac OS. However, oddly enough, when I tried to ping the Windows VM from that Ubuntu VM, that also failed. Adding to my confusion, I was able to successfully ping the Ubuntu VM from the Windows VM and, furthermore, was able to successfully SSH from the Windows VM into the Ubuntu VM, so I have no clue what is going on there.
UPDATE
I presented my problem to ChatGPT per a suggestion from a cousin, and one of the things that it advised me to do was check that the value of ListenAddress in the OpenSSH configuration file was set to the IP address of the VM. It was set by default to 0.0.0.0, so I changed it to the private IP address of the VM. This, however, did not fix my problem :(.
