1. VMWare Player not playing VM and no error in Ubuntu
VMWare player needs to run as root. See the vm-xp script in ~/tools.
2. VMWare Player virtual machine network settings
There are three modes:
• host-only:
in which case it is only visible by the host operating system and not any other node in the network
• reverse NAT
• bridged:
which is by far the most realistic. Any VMWare virtual machine you configure using the bridged option is exactly the same as another physical machine on the LAN segment (a.k.a the broadcast domain). These physical machines, even have MAC addresses and you could configure an DHCP server to even assign them specific IP addresses based on these MACs. There are totally indistinguishable from other real machines connected on the LAN segment. The name 'bridged' alludes to the fact that VMWare implements something akin to a bridge functionality in that it copies packets on the MAC layer.
• VMWare Player interfaces
Upon installing VMWare Player one will notice (with ifconfig) two new interfaces: vmnet1 and vmnet8. These are unrelated to any virtual machines created, they come with the installation of VMWare Player. Actually, if you only create virtual machines of the "bridged" type (see above) you'll never use any of these interfaces, as a "bridged" virtual machine has its own, 'real' interface which you can't see of course by doing an ifconfig at the host operating system.