Open ports for multiple VMware Workstations

[dirtbikedude]

The host is windows 2003 server and guest os is windows xp on all machines. I know how to direct incoming connections to a specific computer but all our workstations need port 6881 open for bit torrent however I can only figure out how to direct that traffic to one workstation at a time. I left the vm IP address field empty in hopes that it would allow any computer to access that port but it won't let you do that either. Can anyone tell me how to open ports for all my virtual machines to access that port? I already checked the virtual machines and none of them have firewalls enabled. I've been struggling with this problem for awhile I'd really appreciate any help someone might have.

[dirtbikedude]

I just want to mention that I'm using NAT networking.

[AWo]

I would say that is not possible. You're using NAT so the external system, which sends packets to your guest(s) only know about one IP address and one port (:6881) where to send the packets to. How should the NAT process know which guest is the receipient? It can only distinguish the receipients by receiving packets on different ports. As long as you only have one IP address/port pair you can't forward them do different guest's.

Otherwise it would happen that packets which belong to one data transfer will be received by different guests and thereby the transfer will never be completed.

[AWo]

But you might be able to get it to work, if you can configure different ports within your torrent application (should be possible, shouldn't it?).

Or you might try to work with different IP addresses for the receiving guests while still using NAT. You have to add a second NAT device, implemented as a VMware guest. This should work as long as the communication is initated by the guest systems:

Internet --> VM NAT (VMnet8) --> (VMnet8) NATGuest (VMnet1) --> (VMnet1 IP1) Guest1

--> (VMnet1 IP2) Guest2

[dirtbikedude]

Ya I understand what you're talking about I'll just change the port # for each machine...for some reason even though I opened that 1 port for that machine it's Extremely slow still! I ran a NAT/Firewall test and it says it's ok but it is ridiculously slow, no joke it would probably be faster on dial up...do you know what might be causing that? or how to fix that?

[AWo]

Slow torrent transfers can have many, many reasons....:-(

Using NAT is maybe one reason. You can run some tests by using bridged networking or running only one guest via NAT. Please remember, that you use multiple guests which have to share one NIC and one Internet connection.