A couple times now in the past several months I’ve needed to install or upgrade VMWare Server 2 running on Windows 2003 and ran into a problem that takes a little while to re-discover the solution for.  This is for future reference and to help others that may hit this in the future.

The problem is that after installing or upgrading VMWare Server 2, my host machine will no longer be able to be reached across the network.  It can communicate (ping, etc) out, but not the other way around.  Hosted virtual machines also have full connectivity, and they can receive communications from the networks.  It’s very strange, but the solution has been to Disable Routing and Remote Access, reboot, and re-enabled it.

Once that’s done, everything is normal.  Fun Stuff.