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10.0.0.3 Admin-Interface of Bridge-VM vmnet1 hostonly
10.0.0.45 Host vmnet1 hostonly
10.0.0.39 Server A vmnet1 hostonly
10.0.0.143 Server B vmnet0 bridged

 


The VM with 3 Nics works as a transparent bridge - Nic 1 and 2 don't have an IP-address, Nic 3 is used for remote administration. The host has no IP on vmnet0 - only VMware Bridge Protocol is required.

 

VMnet0 is down : the host can access server A and B and the admin-interface of the bridge.
VMnet0 is up:      the host and everyone else can access server A and B



The transparent bridge VM must have a ruleset that passes any protocol from anywhere to anywhere. I prefer OpenBSD for this scenario - m0n0wall (small FreeBSD firewall from CD) can do this - any recent Linux will work.


Advantage: Host and VMs are in one subnet - no matter if the bridged network is up or down.
When the bridge is up all nodes can be addressed from the outside without having to do any
reconfiguration.
Drawback: the transparent bridge VM has to be active to access LAN or WAN from the host.