A VM appears as a separate physical computer that belongs to the same subnet as the Mac it’s running on.

The VM acts as a standalone computer in the network and should be configured in the same way as a real one.

Generally, your VM acquires an IP address and other network details automatically from your network DHCP server to access the local network and Internet through one of the network adapters installed on the host computer. Your VM will have its own identity on your network. When this networking mode is used, your VM’s network card establishes a direct connection with your Mac network card using a technology called “bridging.”

A VM can ping computers in the real subnet.Īpply Separate Network Settings to your VM (Bridged Mode):.

A VM is not visible in the real subnet the Mac belongs to.

A VM belongs to that virtual subnet with its own IP range.

Parallels Desktop creates a separate virtual subnet with its own virtual DHCP server running in OS X.

When this networking mode is used your Mac will work as a router for your VM. This is the recommended type of networking for the VMs. It’s the easiest to use because your VM can use any type of network connection available on the Mac to connect to Internet, so it’s useful when you have a limited supply of IP addresses on your network.

In this networking mode, we use the Mac network to connect to the external network. It’s applied by default, unless you change it to something different. When you set up a new VM, one of the basic network modes to choose from will be Shared mode. Share Network Settings Between Mac OS X and Windows (Shared Mode): Let’s take a look at how they work and what we can do with these three network modes. These are Bridged, Shared and Host-Only. Parallels Desktop has three different networking modes to “talk to the world”. How does your virtual machine connect to the Internet in Parallels Desktop? This is a question I hear pretty often from users, so let me shed some light on this.

Guest blog by RamaKrishna Sarma Chavali, Parallels Support Team

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