Nilesh D Kapadia

In VMWare Fusion, when using NAT, you often times want the IP addresses for the VMs to always be the same, so that you can connect to them from the host using the same IP address every time (and probably assign an entry in your /etc/hosts file). You may also want to connect to the host from the guests using a constant IP address. And finally, with VMs that use NAT, you may want to setup port forwarding so that machines outside of the host can connect to services on your VM (and this relies on the IP addresses remaining the same).

The configuration files for doing this reside in /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/vmnet8/ (the NAT interface is called "vmnet8" hence why configuration for it is here), specifically dhcpd.conf and nat.conf. These files may be read-only (even for root), so make sure to give root write permission before you edit them.

Any changes to these files requires that the following be executed before they take effect:

sudo "/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/boot.sh" --restart

Update: VMWare Fusion 2.0.5 now supports Ubuntu 9.04. I recommend upgrading to 2.0.5 and installing the latest VMWare tools in your Ubuntu 9.04 guest, rather than following these instructions.
Update 2: Since upgrading to 2.0.5, I have been experiencing problems. Shutting down my Linux VM often causes VMWare Fusion to crash and once locked up my entire system, forcing me to hard boot and my Linux VM was corrupted in the process. I am reverting back to 2.0.4 for now, and have restored my Linux VM from a backup that I made before I upgraded to 2.0.5 which uses the VMWare Tools as modified in these instructions.

For an Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) guest, VMWare Tools does not work perfectly in VMWare Fusion 2.0.4 out-of-box (I had problems with mouse ungrab and window resizing, and the file sharing module doesn't even compile), but there is a way to get things working better. Someone at VMWare posted this blog which helped me get things working (along with the article and forum posting it linked to).

Here's what I did:

I upgraded a Ubuntu VM that I use in VMWare Fusion from 8.04 to 8.10 ("Intrepid Ibex") and was having mouse issues. On a single-click the mouse would act like it was initiating a drag-lock. I could work around it by using the keyboard or rapidly clicking the mouse until it sent a single-click. The solution was to configure the vmmouse driver in xorg.conf.

My xorg.conf mouse configuration originally looked like this:

Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier      "Configured Mouse"
        Driver          "mouse"
        Option          "CorePointer"
        Option          "Device"                "/dev/input/mice"
        Option          "Protocol"              "ImPS/2"
        Option          "ZAxisMapping"          "4 5"
        Option          "Emulate3Buttons"       "true"
EndSection

I changed the driver to vmmouse:

Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier      "Configured Mouse"
        Driver          "vmmouse"
        Option          "CorePointer"
        Option          "Device"                "/dev/input/mice"
        Option          "Protocol"              "ImPS/2"
        Option          "ZAxisMapping"          "4 5"
        Option          "Emulate3Buttons"       "true"
EndSection

A VMWare employee (Eric Tung) has written up some unofficial guides for VMWare Fusion which are useful:

A Beginner's Guide to VMware Fusion

A Power User's Guide to VMware Fusion

The Power User's Guide is especially useful and has some interesting features.