Install loopback network adapter in Vista host to connect virtual machine

Hello,

I am very busy to setup my new house in last month. After that, I also upgrade my XP to vista and plan to run a Windows 2008 virtual machine. Therefore I try to setup a loopback network adapter to connect between vista host and virtual machine running on Virtual PC 2007. Initially I think this is a 5-minutes task, and you can easily find information / steps from the internet teaching you how to do this. However after reading thr’ the internet, I cannot find the correct steps to setup loopback adapter with virtual PC.

I find a web site that just have a little problem with the setup procedures:
http://weblogs.asp.net/bsimser/archive/2009/04/20/using-the-loopback-adapter-and-sharepoint.aspx

Here are the high-level steps:

1.  install loopback network adapter in host machine (vista)
2. configure static ip  (say 192.168.0.1 with subnet 255.255.255.0) to loopback network adapter
3. assign the loopback network adapter ONLY to virtual machine (win2008) networking setting.
4. start virtual machine
5. go to network connection in virtual machine, you can find there is a network adapter here.
6. then configure this network adapter with static ip (say 192.168.0.100 with subnet 255.255.255.0)
7. then try to ping 192.168.0.1 from virtual machine.
8. If you want to use the computer name to ping each other, you can open windows\system32\drivers\etc\host file and add the corresponding entry; do this for both host and virtual machine.

Now my vista (host) can talk to win 2008 (virtual machine) each other.   Wish this can help you setup your network in 5 minutes…(i used 2 hours to make this work).