As you might have noticed in VMWare the default network mode is “Bridged”, which means that your VMWare guest OS will behave as a separate computer with its own IP address. It’s all good except one thing – it requires your PC (on which VMWare is running) to be connected to a LAN. In other words, the network adapter of your computer must have an IP address assigned, otherwise you wont get VMWare networking to work.
Luckly, if you use MS Windows, there is a thing called Loopback network adapter. In Vista, for example, (as I suspect) it’s installed by default (you just have to enable it via settings of your network adapter). In Windows XP, you might have to install it.
What it does is emulates a LAN on your PC and makes it so you don’t need to be connected to a network in order to develop/test your applications on the network. It’s pretty handy if you have a dev server set up in VMWare. Just enable this loopback network connection everytime you are not on the physical network but want to use VMWare.
