I’ve been having an issue where my physical ethernet interface would disappear from the choices of interfaces to bridge to in VMware Workstation for Windows whenever I hibernate my machine. This is a little annoying, as I have a VM that I would like attached to the physical network.
The easy solution to this problem is to open up the virtual network editor and click on the “Restore Defaults” button. This reinstalls the VMware network components and sets everything back up like it would be if your install was brand new. However, it’s annoying to have to do this every time I power up the machine.
continuum over at the VMware Communities message boards pointed me towards the solution — restarting the hidden “vmnetbridge” service also does the trick. However, again, it’s annoying to have to do this every time the machine is powered on.
I tried writing a batch file to restart the service and scheduling that to execute at power on but I couldn’t find an appropriate trigger to have the Windows task scheduler execute it.
So, I wrote a system service in C# that hangs out in the background and restarts the vmnetbridge service whenever the machine wakes up from hibernate or sleep. This handles the problem brilliantly — no effort required after the service is installed, but the VMware “Bridge” interface keeps working as expected. You can download it from its new project page, here.
