I have Windows XP running inside Windows 7 via Virtual PC (XPMode). Now I want the IE6 browser inside the virtual XP guest instance to be able to talk to the IIS webserver running in the host OS (Windows 7 IIS 7.5).
I understand I need to setup a Loopback Adapter which I have done, but I'm not quite sure how to go about configuring it. I've found plenty of articles on google (and even on StackOverflow) saying to use Loopback Adapter, but seem to be a bit light on details.
I have installed the Microsoft Loopback Adapter in the host OS (Windows 7) and configured it to use static IP address of 10.0.0.1 and subnet of 255.255.255.0 and Default Gateway is set to blank. I have then configured my virtual PC guest to use two network adapters (in Virtual PC), one is set to Shared Networking (NAT) and the other is set to 'Microsoft Loopback Adapter'. In the XP guest I have given the Loopback Adapter a static IP of 10.0.0.2 and subset of 255.255.255.0 and default gateway is blank. Finally, I have editted the hosts file in the guest and added the line
10.0.0.1 mywebsite.dev
The same line has been added to the hosts file in the host OS, except using 127.0.0.1 instead of 10.0.0.1 and typing mywebsite.dev in a browser opens up the website just fine, but on the guest XP OS I just get a "The page cannot be displayed".
Have I configured this all correctly? Anything I've missed? Networking is not my strong point!
Best Answer
I'm fairly new here, so I'm not sure if answering old questions is the done thing or not... but if this answer had been here yesterday it would have helped me, so, here goes.
I used the info on this technet page to set up the loopback adapter, and it had almost everything that I needed.
The only issue that I then had was trying to get my VM to access the internet via the Host's connection. I attempted to use Internet Sharing on the Host's network connection to share the connection with the Loopback adapter however, as the Loopback Adapter appeared in Windows 7 as "Unidentified", it was categorized as a Public connection and wouldn't share.
To get round this - I set the default gateway of the Loopback Adapter (accessible by modifying the Loopback Adapter ipV4 settings) to the IP address of my Virtual Machine. This enabled me to categorize the Loopback Adapter connection as a Home or Work network - and hey presto, the network sharing started working.