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I have a little issue which is rather odd.

I have a VM passed to me by a colleague which I host on my laptop (lets call the laptop, machine A). I have since copied this VM to another host machine (B) on the same network and stopped using the VM on machine A.

The issue I have now is that the VM on the machine B still uses the IP of machine A even when on bridge mode. I have tried ipconfig \release and \renew but to no avail - the VM on machine B retains the IP of machine A. We use a DHCP so its supposed to be dynamic IPs anyway.

A side effect of this is that everytime the VM on Machine B is running, Machine A (the machine itself and not a VM) will go offline and have no connectivity. A third party who uses RDP to the IP address will enter the VM on machine B instead of machine A.

Why is this the case and how can I fix this?

Some details: I use VMware player and the host + VMs are all on Windows OSes.

To add: When I do ipconfig \all, I get a (Preferred) next to the IP address.

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can you open command prompt and preform ipconfig \all and what does it say for DHCP Enabled....... –  Cameron Aziz Jul 6 '12 at 4:13
it says "Yes"... –  Reuben L. Jul 6 '12 at 4:22
hmm. what about the mac address of the VM and the mac address of machine A? Are they the same? –  Cameron Aziz Jul 6 '12 at 4:25
they were the same. but the thought crossed my mind that it may be the issue and so I changed the mac address of the VM to a different one and tried renewing the IP. still didnt work. –  Reuben L. Jul 6 '12 at 4:33

1 Answer 1

up vote 2 down vote accepted

Well it looks like your MAC addresses are the same

Your router is assigning the IP according to the MAC address, and thus, when you turn the second machine on, it receives the newly assigned IP.

Try this:

  1. Shut down machine A
  2. Shut down VM
  3. Bring up machine A and request new IP
  4. Change MAC address on VM, bring up VM and a new IP should be given.
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looks like you are right. i forgot the most important rule when dealing with windows machines... restart after making changes. –  Reuben L. Jul 6 '12 at 4:43

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