I have 5 static IPs from my ISP (Comcast) and I have a physical machine with VMware ESXi 4.0 on it that is hosting multiple virtual machines. Right now I am just using the default vmware virtual network (vswitch0) with DHCP from the Comcast IP Gateway Router and everything is working fine. Each virtual machine can access the internet, etc.

One of my virtual machines is a webserver (Windows Server 2008) and I want to assign it to 1 of my 5 static IPs so it's accessible from the public internet, while leaving the other VMs on the internal LAN still using DHCP.

If I just plug my laptop directly into the Comcast IP Gateway (it has 4 ports on the back) and assign my laptop a Static IP using the windows networking dialogs, then I can hit my laptop from the public internet and it works great. However, if I try to do the same steps to set a static IP config on my Windows Server 2008 VM, it does not work. The VM cannot access the internet (open Firefox and try to visit google.com), and I cannnot see the VM from the public internet either.

I'm assuming I'm missing something in the ESXi config somewhere, but I'm pretty new to ESXi and I'm not sure how to configure it to work this way.