VMware Player vs. Virtual Network Editor

Those of us that work with VMware Workstation and use multiple networks (physical NICs or VLANs) on the host computer, are used to work with the Virtual Network Editor. This tool assigns network connections on the physical host to virtual networks. A VM can then be assigned to a virtual network adapter that is linked to a specific adapter on the physical host.

It may seem that this tool is missing if one has only the VMware Player at hand. But it comes with the installation package - it just needs to be extracted.

Follow these steps to extract the Virtual Network Editor: (in the example below D:\Downloads\ is the download location)

1. Download the VMware Player installation package (needs a registration with VMware)
2. Open a command line and change to D:\Downloads\
3. Run the following command: [VMware Player installation package] /e ./Extract (this will extract the contents to a subfolder "Extract")
4. Open the subfolder Extract and look into the network.cab file
5. Extract the files inside the .cab file into the VMware Player installation folder
6. Run vmnetcfg.exe if you need the Virtual Network Editor