I came across a neat thing in VMware Workstation the other day when messing with the NAT networking. I have a local VMware machine that is configured as a Squid Proxy server (nice for Ad blocking and caching of Windows Updates, etc.). At first, I had it bridged to our main network, but I decided I wanted to have it available to matter what network I connected to, so I decided to try to figure out how to get it working well with VMware NAT. Getting everything working and accessible locally was easy enough, but one of the main things I wanted a caching proxy for was downloading Windows updates to all my Windows virtual machines. So, I need all my bridged virtual machines to be able to use the virtual machine that was in my VMware NAT network. The solution, port forwarding. On the NAT tab in Virtual Network Editor, click Edit… -> Port Forwarding. Here you can set up TCP/UDP ports that you want to publish on your primary NIC used by NAT. Mine looks like this: [more]
So, now I can access my VMware Squid Proxy in my VMware NAT network from my primary network using <my IP address>:8080, <my hostname>:8080, or locally by using localhost:8080. I can point all my bridged VMware machines to this location as well. (Anyone on my local network can actually access the proxy.)