Running LAN Zoo on VMware Fusion for Mac

Product: Zoo
Summary: Discusses the LAN Zoo and running it on VMware on macOS

Question

We installed the LAN Zoo on VMware Fusion Pro and Windows on our macOS server. For some reason, it just does not work. From Rhino, we have tried both the automatic detection and specifying the server's IP address. Rhino reports, “An unknown exception has occurred. Please contact your system administrator for assistance.”

Answer

Keep in mind that you're not just running Windows, you're running Windows as a virtual machine under macOS. So there will be extra network configuration required to make all this work.

If you are not familiar with VMware and networking, this is worth reviewing: Understanding networking types in VMware Fusion.

Also, you can find more helpful information by searching the web for “Run Web Server on VMware Fusion”. Keep in mind that the LAN Zoo uses TCP Port 80 just like a web server.

Configuration might be very simple or very involved. It depends on what your Mac server is doing and how many other VMware sessions it supports.

For example, if your Mac server does not host any web services and only runs a single VMware session, then you only need to configure the session's network adapter for Bridged mode. This is the simplest way to get the LAN Zoo to work on VMware.

If you need the network adapter configured for NAT, then you will need to configure VMware for port forwarding.

Configuring a Web server on a virtual machine that uses NAT mode networking