I have several VMs which use DHCP to get an IP address and are set up with host-only networking. They all fail to get their DHCP address if I don't have internet sharing turned on. I don't understand why the internal virtual network isn't always available. For the work I do, I don't necessarily need (or want) these boxes to have internet access. Am I missing some setting? How do I have my virtual network work with or w/out sharing enabled? Thanks John
You should turn internet sharing on and they still can't get to the internet untill you configure the firewall to pass packets from/to the VMs that are in host-only mode. I found that out using ethereal to capture packets in both en0, the connection to my local router, and en2, a virtual LAN set up by Parallels. Even with internet sharing on, host only packets are not passed to en0 until the firewall allows it. I'm going to write a cocoa application to provide a configuration tool with GUI that will allow traffic shaping/firewall among VMs.
