VMware Server, host-only networking and a pinch of promiscuous mode

Today I was playing around with VMware server and two OpenBSD virtual machines that resided on the same vmnet network. I noticed, that vmnet seemed to operate in “switch” mode. I was sending a ping from the host OS to VM1 and VM2 was not able to see the packet. After digging around the web, I found a solution:

1.) create a user group vmadm 2.) add the UID which is used tu run the VMs to this group 3.) change the group ownership of the vmnet interfaces to this group 4.) allow group members to read/write to the vmnet interfaces

e.g on Debian execute (VMs run as UID vmrun, VMs use vmnet1):

addgroup vmadm
adduser vmrun vmadm
chgrp vmnet /dev/vmnet1
chmod g+rw /dev/vmnet1