After installing VMWare Workstation on a new machine I came across the above error which I’d never seen before – there were no currently-bridged adapters available to bind my virtual network to.
I believe the trigger was disabling the 2 automatically created virtual network adapters before I’d actually opened up a VM. The long and short of it os that the bridging kernel driver is not running, probably due to the fact that the vmware bridge protocol is not installed on the physical network adapter(s).
So:
- Click on your network connections and choose “Open Network and Sharing Center”
- Open the properties for your NIC and check whether youhave the VMWare Bridge protocol installed
- If not, add the service and choose “VMware ridge Protocol” from the next dialogue box. If there are no services to install then it is likely that your install is corrupted and a reinstallation would be beneficial.
- If you have just added the bridging protocol OR if you already had it installed but you couldn’t see bridging adapters underyour virtual network preferences, starting the vmnet bridging driver is the next step. Open a command window (if using Vista or 7 then you need to open a command window with administrator privileges) and type “net start vmnetbridge”:
