I'm new to VMware and setting up an Esxi server as a trial with the intention of possibly virtualizing some of our servers in the near future. I have setup ESXi on a Dell poweredge server, and installed a Centos 5.6 and Ubuntu 11.04 guest os on the server. However I cannot get networking on my guest OS's. The host is connected to a network with a DHCP server via a switch and is configured with a static IP.

I have the default set-up for networking on the host: both guests are connected to the default vmnic1 adapter via the virtual switch vSwitch0. One thing though, the virtual adapter shows 'Observed IP ranges' to be XXX.XXX.XXX.194-XXX.XXX.XXX.195 (I've blanked out the initial prefixes) i.e just 1 address, even though the network the host is connected to has the usual 255.255.255.0 subnet mask. On the guest machines (using DHCP) by default, I can see an eth0 interface but with no connection or assigned IP address. A physical machine connected to the network gets a DHCP lease as expected. How do I get networking working on my guest OSes? Apologies for the long-winded question.