My home lab virtual machines are connected on private network 192.168.1.x. All internet traffic goes to a gateway server and is forwarded over the internet network adapter. The gateway server is a DHCP server also to assign IP addresses to my lab devices. The benefit to use my own DHCP server is I can control some advanced DHCP settings in the simple GUI interface. However, I didn’t find the DHCP settings on VMware Fusion 12 for the private network. And my VMs got 172.x.x.x DHCP IP addresses automatically.
The reason is I’m using macOS Big Sur. Apple requests developers to use the vmnet framework for network virtualization programming. The framework only offers limited functions for virtualized networking. This limitation is confirmed by VMware staff in the community.
Since macOS has its own DHCP server. One workaround is to disable the native DHCP server by following the command which is mentioned in the same post:
sudo /bin/launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/bootps.plist