In the new VMware Work­sta­tion 8 release, VMware has added a rudi­men­tary net­work sim­u­la­tion set­ting where you can tweak band­width and packet loss for a given net­work card. Very use­ful when test­ing appli­ca­tions and servers and want to know how they react to net­work issues, or if you want to sim­u­late a WAN link. I know this was avail­able in Work­sta­tion 7 as well, but it used to be a team fea­ture. Now it’s per vNIC fea­ture, which makes it much more useable.

Con­fig­ur­ing it is very easy, but you need to know where to look to be able to find the feature.

Con­fig­ur­ing Net­work Adapter Advanced Set­tings in VMware Work­sta­tion 8

  • Find your VM, right click it and select set­tings
  • Select the Net­work Adapter and click on the “Advanced…” but­ton
  • This brings up the Net­work Adapter Advanced Set­tings win­dow, where you can tweak the net­work set­tings includ­ing inbound/outbound band­width and packet loss per­cent­age

    There are a num­ber of pre­de­fined set­tings for band­width, mak­ing it easy to sim­u­late var­i­ous sce­nar­ios like ISDN, cable, leased T3 and so on. You can even mod­ify the vir­tual net­work card MAC address in the same win­dow, if you need to do that.
  • Tweak the set­tings, and the new band­width and packet loss set­tings will imme­di­ately be applied to the VM

Con­fig­ur­ing Net­work Adapter Advanced Set­tings in VMware Work­sta­tion 8: Video Demo

Con­clu­sion

I love this. In my day job I’m often faced with sim­u­lat­ing how dif­fer­ent appli­ca­tions work over some rather wonky WAN lines, and build­ing this kind of fea­ture set into VMware Work­sta­tion 8 makes a lot of sense. I do hope they improve it in the future though, as I really would like to see it add tweak­able set­tings for latency as well, which often is the main killer in WAN envi­ron­ments. For now, I’ll have to stick to WANem for the latency sim­u­la­tion, at least until VMware adds latency tweak­ing to VMware Workstation.

Written by . Christian is the owner of vNinja.net and a Senior Consultant for EVRY ASA, specializing in virtualization. Active twitter user and vSoup.net Virtualization Podcast co-host.