Understanding VM Networking

Prerequisites

1. You’ve installed the Anka Virtualization package
2. You’ve got an active license
3. You’ve created your first VM Template
4. You understand how to start and access your VM
5. You grasp how to modify VM settings, like network-card

By default, we use Apple’s VMNET interface for networking. We also configure the network service as “Using DHCP”.

Anka VMs, by default, use a shared networking configuration with the host. It’s a kind of NAT + DHCP. Every time you start/resume a VM, it gets assigned an IP that you can see with sudo anka show {vmNameOrUUID} command.

SSH access (“Remote Login”) is enabled by default on Anka VMs.

Within the VM, you can find an IP assigned to the host which can be used to ssh or transfer files out. To determine which IP is assigned to the host, execute ipconfig getoption en0 server_identifier (typically 192.168.64.1 for shared network mode and 192.168.128.1 for host network mode)

Changing the network configuration for Anka VMs

> sudo anka modify 12.0.1 set network-card --help
Usage: anka modify set network-card [OPTIONS] [INDEX]...

  Modify network card settings

Options:
  -t, --type [shared|host|bridge|disconnected]
  -b, --bridge TEXT               host interface name to bridge with
  -m, --mac TEXT                  specify fixed MAC address
  -n, --no-mac                    deassign fixed MAC address
  --direct-mac / --no-direct-mac  expose --mac externally
  -v, --vlan INTEGER              assign VLAN ID
  -c, --controller [anet|virtio-net]
                                  set controller
  --local / --no-local            enable (default)/disable inter-VM and VM-host communication
  --help                          Display usage information

❯ anka describe 11.0.1
. . .
network_cards

+------------+--------+--------+-----------+
|   pci_slot | type   | mode   |    pci_id |
+============+========+========+===========+
|         28 | anet   | shared | 538975646 |
+------------+--------+--------+-----------+
. . .

❯ anka modify 11.0.1 set network-card --type bridge --bridge en7

❯ anka describe 11.0.1
. . .
network_cards

+------------+--------+--------+-----------+
|   pci_slot | type   | mode   |    pci_id |
+============+========+========+===========+
|         28 | anet   | bridge | 538975646 |
+------------+--------+--------+-----------+
. . .

Assigning a Static IP

Anka CLI version 2.2 and greater supports Static IP on VMs running on Catalina hosts (the guest OS can be any supported macOS version):

MAC Addresses

Anka will dynamically assign MAC addresses to your VM. In Catalina and higher, you can assign custom MAC Addresses with the anka modify set network-card --mac option.

Be aware that if you clone your VM Template with a specific MAC, both VMs cannot run at the same time

When using bridged networking mode for your VM, dynamic MAC Addresses are not guaranteed to be unique, though, reuse/collision is extremely unlikely. We do our best to prevent this with our randomization logic.

In Mojave or older macOS versions: Even if a custom MAC is set, Apple’s VMNET doesn’t recognize it on the network outside of the VM. We do a translation from the custom MAC to the one VMNET assigns. This causes the external to VM network to see the VMNET MAC, but inside of the VM you’ll see the custom MAC.

If a MAC address isn’t specified in the VM config, it treated as dynamic and Anka handles such cases for suspended VMs.

What’s next?

• Activating your Anka License

FAQs

• Should your Firewall software be blocking VM networking, you need to whitelist the ankanetd process.