I have a Virtual PC/VMWare machine that runs Windows Server 2003. This virtual machine uses an IPSec VPN client program to connect to a remote network. I configured the virtual machine to have 2 NICs:

• NAT - to be used by the VPN Client to access the remote network
• Host only - to be able to access the virtual machine from the host

The reason I have this setup is because I want to be able to access some remote network from the host machine. I could've installed the VPN client on the host machine, but the host runs Windows 7 and the client doesn't support it.

The problem: although the virtual machine is normally reachable (ping + http access), as soon as the VPN client is started, neither of the NIC addresses are reachable anymore.

I'm wondering if it is a routing problem that needs to be addressed? How do routing/VPN client connection affect the ability of the server to respond to client requests from the host?