Workstation Pro does not allow the virtual network adapter to go into promiscuous mode unless the user running Workstation Pro has permission to make that setting. This restriction follows the standard Linux practice that only the root user can put a network interface into promiscuous mode.
When you install and configure Workstation Pro, you must run the installation as the root user. Because Workstation Pro creates the vmnet devices with root ownership and root group ownership, only the root user has read and write permissions to the devices.
To set a virtual machine network adapter to promiscuous mode, you must launch Workstation Pro as the root user because you must have read and write access to the vmnet device. For example, if you use bridged networking, you must have access to /dev/vmnet0.
To grant selected users read and write access to the vmnet device, you can create a new group, add the appropriate users to the group, and grant that group read and write access to the appropriate device. You must make these changes on the host operating system as the root user.
In this example, newgroup is the group that should be able to set vmnet0 to promiscuous mode.
chgrp newgroup /dev/vmnet0 chmod g+rw /dev/vmnet0
In the next example, all users are able to set vmnet0 to promiscuous mode.
chmod a+rw /dev/vmnet0
