That seems to be a common problem that users of VMware Fusion suffer from. I had to face it recently. I use VMware Fusion on Snow Leopard (OS X) to run Slackware Linux. My MacBook, on which I am running Snow Leopard, is connected to a WiFi hotspot via AirPort. I have VMware Fusion set up to use the network in bridged mode.
A few days back, after having rebooted OS X (I reboot it what appears to be once every month), I started getting “The network bridge on device /dev/vmnet0 is not running” error on booting the Slackware VM. The network remained disconnected, with any attempts to connect it manually ending in that error. That meant that I could not get the VM on the network and use it (I tend to remotely utilise the VM over secure shell).
Quitting and re-running VMware Fusion went in vain. It wasn’t until I searched for a possible cause of the problem and solution that I found one that worked for me. This particular solution requires manually restarting a bootstrap BASH script that is bundled with VMware Fusion. This script takes care of setting up the pertinent network interfaces and their modes, which are subsequently used by VMs.
To be specific, that particular bootstrap script is found under the following folder:
/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/
The name of script is “boot.sh“, and requires it be executed as root. So, all in all, what needs to be done is running this command from the shell:
$ sudo /Library/Application\ Support/VMware\ Fusion/boot.sh --restart
I found this tip mentioned in one of the responses in the discussion here.
Libel 