Can VMWare be configured to use a proxy?

I'm evaluating some software solutions, so a simple "yes" or "no" would be nice. I'm having some issues getting a simple answer with my own searches...

The configuration would work like this: I have a VM (guest OS shouldn't matter), running in VMWare Workstation on an MS-Windows OS host. The host can access a proxy server (a SOCKS or HTTP proxy) to connect to the internet if it needs to.

Can I configure the VMWare VM container to use the proxy server for all its internet and network access, such that the guest OS has no idea it's going through a proxy? It simply sees the internet directly.

Thus have VMWare do the proxy handling, instead of the host OS or the guest OS.

Solution 1:

One way of doing this might be creating one VM that acts as a router which then does the transparent proxy for you using something like redsocks. Then configure your other VMs to use this one as their default gateway.

There is a procedure on how to configure a server as a transparent socks proxy available at: http://przemoc.net/tips/linux#making_socks_proxy_transparent

And some general information about redsocks here: http://darkk.net.ru/redsocks/

Solution 2:

VMware Workstation (or any other VMware product that I know of) does not natively have this functionality.

Your best bet is to set up a transparent proxy on your network, which will require configuring your gateway to forward whatever traffic (port 80, etc) you are trying to proxy.