Virtual Machine With PLC Software

[PFrog]

Hello,

I am setting up a virtual machine with PLC monitoring software. For serial/USB connections to the PLC's, there is no issue connecting a laptop to it as this info is forwarded over the RDP connection to the VM.

The issue I have is some of these PLC units are Ethernet, and are on their own local networks, with different subnets.

Is there a way I can forward the IP address of the laptop, to the VM, so the PLC monitoring software can use it? I would like to be able to change the laptop IP on this different networks, but am not really sure how to accomplish it.

Thanks

[JesperMP]

What VM software ?

For VMware, what works best is to let the ethernet on the VM be "bridged", and set the IPs of the VM NIC and the real NIC in the same subnet. I.e. 10.20.3.10 and 10.20.3.1.

Also, specify the real NICs MAC adress for the VM NIC, and you can reach even ISO layer 2 devices, i.e. using the MAC address to find and set the IP address. This works for Siemens software and thus I guess for other softwares as well.

[PFrog]

I'm using VMWare for this. I think I have a workaround for this by:



- The first option is to verify if the GuestOS in this virtual machine running the monitoring software, allows the virtual machine to have more than one network adapter. In case positive, a network card can be added to the virtual machine via vSphere client, and be configured in the desired subnet.
- The second option would be adding routes among the subnets, enabling a L3 connection in the routers or the L3 switch that would allow the communication in different broadcast domains by routing the traffic through different subnets.