Ok so here’s the low-down. I got a new Vostro lappy for work and I was really hoping that it would be easy to get all my crap ported over to it. I was a little leary about how well my virtual machines would port over; turns out for good reason. For the life of me I couldn’t get an IP from the DHCP server! I was running Debian Linux on a Vista host. The VM was originally created using VMWare Workstation but now was running under the free VMWare Server. This new computer has Norton Internet Security and I’ve had issues with that before with mystery blocking etc. I was able to communicate with the VM through the shared private network and also through the Bridged interface only when I hardcoded the IP. It still couldn’t reach the internet though. Well after turning off all possible options, quadruple checking my adapter settings and all that fun crap, it came down to this.
In order to get Bridged Mode working on the Virtual Machine, the adapter it connects to must support promiscuous mode. It was connecting to my Wireless adapter..just like it was in the previous computer. You think it supported it? yeah..bad times. I simply told VM to use the normal Lan adapter, connected it to the wireless switch and kablam, i had my IP..Nice 5 hours of wasted time. I hope this helps someone cause it took me forever to figure out 
