Ran into some problems yesterday with VMware networking. It started after a few months of constantly adding and changing networks. Sometimes via Vagrant other times manually. In the end, while the VMNet networking devices would start, all of the network interfaces within the VMs were showing disconnected. Here is how I solved it:

Restart Fusion Networking

First step was to just restart the Fusion networking stack:

sudo /Applications/VMware Fusion.app/Contents/Library/vmnet-cli –configure
sudo /Applications/VMware Fusion.app/Contents/Library/vmnet-cli –stop
sudo /Applications/VMware Fusion.app/Contents/Library/vmnet-cli –start

Most of the time, this fixes things. In this case, I needed a bigger bat.

Factory Reset Networking

Next up, was to apply a little bit more violence to the networking stack. In this case, a factory reset of the networking (per this KB):

1. Quit Fusion and Reboot (to be sure).
2. In a terminal:
   sudo rm -f “Library/Preferences/VMware Fusion/networking”
   sudo rm -f “Library/Preferences/VMware Fusion/locations”
   sudo /Applications/VMware Fusion.app/Contents/Library/vmnet-cli –start
3. reboot… yes again.

Ok, so, after this, networking should be fixed, right? Right? For me, not so much. This time we move from bats to a strategic machete.

Manually Uninstalling Fusion & Re-Install

As the option of last resort, it was time to uninstall and reinstall. However, a basic uninstall wasn’t good enough for as deep as this corruption ran. So following this KB was in order. The bit that tripped me up, was how many of these files needed to be deleted:

    /Library/Application Support/VMware
    /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion
    /Library/Preferences/VMware Fusion
    ~/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion
    ~/Library/Caches/com.vmware.fusion
    ~/Library/Preferences/VMware Fusion
    ~/Library/Preferences/com.vmware.fusion.LSSharedFileList.plist
    ~/Library/Preferences/com.vmware.fusion.LSSharedFileList.plist.lockfile
    ~/Library/Preferences/com.vmware.fusion.plist
    ~/Library/Preferences/com.vmware.fusion.plist.lockfile
    ~/Library/Preferences/com.vmware.fusionDaemon.plist
    ~/Library/Preferences/com.vmware.fusionDaemon.plist.lockfile
    ~/Library/Preferences/com.vmware.fusionStartMenu.plist
    ~/Library/Preferences/com.vmware.fusionStartMenu.plist.lockfile

Hope this helps.