How to simulate two different LANs

[BrainSurgery]

I am wondering about the following:
I am about to test a simple NLB cluster with the help of vmware. For that reason I want to have two LANs to play with.

My computer has one NIC installed in the physical machine that uses the 192.168.0.0/24 adress space.

I have two virtual machines installed in VMware workstation 5. Both vmware machines has two virtual NICs. One of them (in each machine) I want to link to the physical LAN in the real world, but the other NIC (in each virtual machine) I want to use a virtual 10.10.10.0/24 adress space ... that is only visible between the two vmware machines.

Is it possible? And what is the best approach to set it up?

 

[SjrH]

You could install the MS loopback adapter on your OS and then assign the two virtual nics to the same VMWare bridge for that adapter.
I have successfully tested both nlb and clustering with this method.

 

[tuliphead]

Loopback adapter? 127.0.0.1? localhost? Could you be more specific with the approach for this?

 

[SjrH]

Its simple - install the loopback adapter on your O/S, and configure the lan connection for it as say 10.1.1.1 for instance. Configure the VMware bridge protocol for this connection to a custom number, say 3. Now edit the NIC properties for your virtual system to bind to VMware bridge 3 and configure the virtual adapter to say 10.1.1.50.
Obviously use the same mask for both and each will be able to communicate.
VMware is functioning higher up the osi stack so as far as its concerned the loopback is as real an adapter as an installed one and anything configured on the local system to use it will work.
You cant use this method to communicate between physical systems but on one local system it works fine.