Which of the following systems acts as a NAT device when utilizing VMware in NAT mode?

The guest system is the VM being virtualized; it uses the NAT service but does not itself perform the address translation.

The local gateway is the upstream physical router on the external network and is unaware of the virtualized NAT occurring inside the VMware environment.

The host system runs the VMware application, but the NAT function is executed by VMware's dedicated virtual NAT component rather than the host OS networking stack directly.

VMware NAT mode implements a virtual NAT device as part of the VMware virtualization layer, typically bound to a virtual network adapter such as VMnet8. This virtual system translates the private IP addresses of guest VMs to the host machine's IP address for outbound traffic, and reverses the translation for inbound responses, without requiring the guest or host OS to natively perform the translation.