My last suggestion is that if you are local to the host machine that holds the VM, you should be able to connect to it locally and turn off the network and still maintain access (I'm not 100% sure on this and even then, my only experience with VMs is Hyper-V on Windows).
The only other thing is to try a network monitor (I used wireShark and winpcap). I would start it up manually and look for any strange traffic at the point that the webSocket console log was made (which is the call just before the failure I believe).