Mark Needham

Thoughts on Software Development

VMware: Accessing host server

with 2 comments

I’ve been doing all my spare time .NET development from within VMWare for about the last year or so and now and then it’s quite useful to be able to access the host machine either to get some files from there or to access a server that’s running on the host.

The former problem is solved by going to ‘Virtual Machines -> Shared Folders’ and clicking on the + button on the bottom left of the menu to add a folder that you want to share.

This folder will be accessible by going to ‘My Network Places -> Entire Network -> VMWare Shared Folders -> .host -> Shared Folders’ from Windows Explorer or by typing ‘\\.host\Shared Folders’ into the Windows Explorer address bar.

The latter is something I’d not wanted to do until today when I wanted to access a CouchDB server I had running via CouchDBX (thanks to J Chris Anderson for the recommendation) from a .NET application that I was running inside VMWare.

From the host environment I can view all the databases in CouchDB by going to ‘http://127.0.0.1:5984/_utils’ but from VMWare I need to make use of the Gateway IP address which can be found by typing ‘ipconfig’ at the command prompt inside the VM.

The database listing is now available at ‘http://the.gateway.ip:5984/_utils’.

Written by Mark Needham

June 2nd, 2009 at 9:36 pm

Posted in Software Development

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  • Torbjörn Gyllebring

    I don’t use VMWare much but if the gateway ip is static and you get tired of typing it all the time you could add a entry to your ‘hosts’ (commonly found at:%SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc\) file like:
    the.gateway.ip.dotted snazzy_alias

    and then just access it like “http://snazzy_alias:5984/_utils”

  • http://www.markhneedham.com Mark Needham

    Ooooh cool idea.

    We’ve actually been doing that on my project at work to make external websites point to localhost in the dev build. Didn’t think of using it here though.

    Neat.