Workaround for the NAT port forwarding issue in Fusion 8.1

We recently discovered that NAT network port forwarding doesn’t work properly in Fusion 8.1.

While the VMware Fusion team is working on a fix which will be included in the next update, here is a temporary workaround.

Steps:

1. Download the NAT network component from https://www.vmware.com/go/dl_vmnet-natd (MD5: e347f5c8d86640af5102852c897e31cc)
2. Replace /Applications/VMware\ Fusion.app/Contents/Library/vmnet-natd with the file downloaded in step 1.
3. Restart the NAT network with the following commands:

sudo /Applications/VMware\ Fusion.app/Contents/Library/vmnet-cli ––stop

sudo /Applications/VMware\ Fusion.app/Contents/Library/vmnet-cli ––start

Then port forwarding for NAT network should work as normal. 

Sorry for the inconvenience! Hope this helps!