Can I have direct access to wi-fi (i.e. wlan0 device) in virtual machine running on Windows host?

Question

I want to run wi-fi tools on Linux inside of a Windows 7 host. So I need to have the wlan0 device listed in my Linux guest.

I have tried VirtualBox and VMware. No luck so far. Is it even possible?

Hardware is laptop's embedded wi-fi card.

Solution

As far as the VirtualBox docs' networking section go, no, this isn't possible. Sorry. If you can find a USB Wi-Fi adapter that works with your Linux distro, you might have better luck with that.

VirtualBox networking requires either virtualization of the network hardware, or the use of virtio as a virtual network interface from within the guest. It can, however, pass direct control of USB devices to the guest OS. So, if you really don't want to install Linux to the bare metal, your best bet is finding a USB Wi-Fi adapter that does what you need.

Good luck!

Comments

[defhlt]

Thank you! Do you know if the same is true for VMware?

[Vickash]

AFAIK, it's the same on VMWare. The network interface has to be virtualized, except for some of their ESX setups, which are different from the desktop software and require very specific server hardware. They have something called VMDirectPath I/O that lets you basically pass PCI devices directly to the VM.