Is there any movement on providing multiple NIC's. I like (and often need) to have my VMs bridged to a real network. Since I move around between a lot of customer sites though, this means that my IP addresses (host and guest) are moving targets. This is particularly ugly if I want to suspend a guest with a share mounted from the host and resume it somewhere else. I'd like to set up 1 NIC as host-only so that host and guest could always find each other and have the other NIC bridged. Then I can set up permanent hosts entries on the host and each guest and connectivity issues are gone. I ran VMWare on my linux notebook very successfully this way for years and it is (to me at least) really important.
I agree that Multiple NIC support would be great. Our firm is doing a fair amount of network scanning and sniffing. Most configurations require a NIC on the trusted side and a stealth (no IP) NIC on the analyzed side. Also great for IDS such as SNORT. Great product... Thanks again for all of your work.
My reasoning for multiple NICs is slightly different. I use a guest OS Linux machine to do cross development for embedded Linux. When we do this, it is necessary to be able to nfsroot the embedded board's target machine off of an nfs export on the guest OS Linux machine. Right now, the only feasible method of doing this is via usb ethernet device in the Linux guest machine. However, in practice it is too slow with the parallels usb implementation and also flaky when high traffic occurs on a usb ethernet device (like lots of file access over nfs). This wouldn't be a problem if the built-in Ethernet on my macbook pro were available as a second ethernet device in the guest OS.
I'm using Linux guest OS'es for testing of a new solutions for our clients. Support for more than one NIC in Parallels Workstation will give me possibility toalso test some network tools, like: firewalls/bridges/routers - on a VM instead of using real PC. That would be really cool, and very helpful! -Chris
For me, lack of multiple NICs makes Parallels a non-starter (works great on my Macbook, though!). I'm currently evaluating VMWare workstation, which does support multiple (and dedicated) NICs for virtual machines. Also, I've noticed that network performance is much better under VMWare - Getting 8+ megabytes a second under a FreeBSD Guest OS under VMWare workstation, but under Parallels with the single NIC it was around 3 megabytes/sec with the same OS. I really would rather go with Parallels - better price, and it's consistent with my Macbook, but VMWare's product, for my specific needs, appears to answer my requirements perfectly.
