VMware Player and Windows 7 firewall

My Windows 7 firewall (the one by Microsoft that is shipped with the OS) is configured to block all inbound and outbound connections by default. Because all outbound connections are blocked, I manually need to add exceptions for all programs that I want to allow outbound access. This is working fine except with VMware Player 12.0.

Whenever I boot into Windows 10 with the VMware Player, it says: "No Internet access". Once I disable general blocking of all outbound connections, Windows 10 can connect to the Internet just fine with VMware Player. But I don't know why it doesn't work with outbound connections blocked. I have added exceptions for all executables and services related to VMware Player that I could find.

Here is a list of all the outbound exceptions I added. The following executables are allowed outbound connection:

c:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Player\drvInst64.exe
c:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Player\mkisofs.exe
c:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Player\vixDiskMountServer.exe
c:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Player\vmnat.exe
c:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Player\VMnetDHCP.exe
c:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Player\vmplayer.exe
c:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Player\vmUpdateLauncher.exe
c:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Player\vmware-authd.exe
c:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Player\vmware-kvm.exe
c:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Player\vmware-remotemks.exe
c:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Player\vmware-shell-ext-thunker.exe
c:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Player\vmware-unity-helper.exe
c:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Player\vnetlib.exe
c:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Player\vnetlib64.exe
c:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Player\vnetsniffer.exe
c:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Player\vnetstats.exe
c:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Player\vprintproxy.exe
c:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Player\zip.exe
c:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Player\OVFTool\ovftool.exe
c:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Player\tools-upgraders\VMwareToolsUpgrader.exe
c:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Player\x64\vmware-vmx.exe
c:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Player\x64\vmware-vmx-debug.exe
c:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\VMware\USB\vnetlib.exe
c:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\VMware\USB\vnetlib64.exe
c:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\VMware\USB\DriverCache\vnetlib.exe
c:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\VMware\USB\DriverCache\vnetlib64.exe

Since the Windows 7 firewall requires a new rule for each and every executable, this was quite a pain to set up. Additionally, I have added exceptions for the following services:

VMware Authorization Service (VMAuthdService)
VMware DHCP Service (VMnetDHCP)
VMware NAT Service (VMware NAT Service)
VMware USB Arbitration Service (VMUSBArbService)

This is all I could find but unfortunately, it still doesn't work. Windows 10 is unable to connect to the Internet with VMware Player. As soon as I disable general blocking of all outbound connections, it's working fine.

So I'm wondering what could be the cause of this? Is there anything else that I have overlooked and that I need to put on the whitelist for VMware Player to be able to connect to the Internet?

Note that I'm looking for a solution with the Windows 7 firewall. I'm not interested in installing a third-party firewall but I want to use Microsoft's firewall.

Thanks!

Answer

To answer my own question, I examined the logfiles and found that VMware installed another two executables into the system directory:

C:\Windows\SysWOW64\vmnat.exe
C:\Windows\SysWOW64\vmnetdhcp.exe

Adding these two executables to the firewall exceptions solved the issue.