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Thread: virtual machines with different wireless adaptors

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    virtual machines with different wireless adaptors

    been messing around with virtual machine on windows 7 64bit, the xp one that comes with it

    just wondering whether there was a way to use a different wireless network usb device for the virtual machine than the one the host (not sure if thats right word) uses, as in they can connect to different networks: one to my main router, and one to the relay network

    just a technical question really, i like knowing things

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    Re: virtual machines with different wireless adaptors

    With vmware you can push a generic usb device into the vm which then has the driver, make sure you don't load the drive on the host.

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    Re: virtual machines with different wireless adaptors

    so plug in device once virtual machine is running then run from there?

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    Re: virtual machines with different wireless adaptors

    As oolon says, with some Virtual machines, you can have a USB pass through so that the virtual machine sees and uses a USB device instead of the host OS. I have been doing that recently with Virtual Box so that I can use windows only devices on my Linux system.

    The other thing to be aware of, is that with all virtual machines, the devices that the VM sees are all emulated. For example here is the device manager from a WinXP VM I am playing with:



    If you look closely you will see that some of the devices appear rather strange. Who uses an AMD network card for example. (The real hardware spec of my system is on the my system link). The reason for those strange device choices is that those are devices where the VM makers know exactly how they will behave so they can emulate every detail of their operation.

    Back to the topic, what all this means is that short of using USB, your virtual machine will never see your physical devices. It will only ever see emulated versions of them.

    What you may be able to do with a more advanced setup is create routing tables so that network traffic from your VM will only go via a particular network interface, and all other processes on your host OS don't use that interface, but doing things like that will be quite advanced.

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    Re: virtual machines with different wireless adaptors

    Quote Originally Posted by shbris View Post
    so plug in device once virtual machine is running then run from there?
    Yes, that would be best for the first time. With Vmware it remembers which ones were routed into the guest so if you start the guest and the device is present then vmware assumes you want you guest to see it.

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    Re: virtual machines with different wireless adaptors

    ok i think that's answered my question perfectly, i can route the VM to use usb dongle and the host machine can use the cat5.

    i'll have a play around with it and see how i go, cheers guys

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