Ok so this is virtual so that might complicate things....and its windows related (so not sure if it should be in the windows forum) but anyway.

I have a w2k8 machine with 2 NICs.  One for the Machine to use, and one for the VMs.

One of the VMs is windows 7, it is connected to the 2nd Nic for access the server.  This all works fine.  But what annoys me is if I want to transfer a file between these two machines, it's essentially has to go from the vm, to the router and back to the w2k8 machine.

So I thought I'd add a 2nd network card - a virtual one to the Windows 7 and essentially a 3rd network card to the w2k8 host.

This was success and both machines have the extra network cards they need.  But if I leave them alone they both have 169.x.x.x addresses as there is no DHCP server - again fine, I can quite happyily run it as a virtua,l cross over cable for all I care.  But if I set the two machines new network cards to be on the 192.168.2.x network (wk28 was 192.168.2.1 255.255.255.0 with 192.168.2.1 gateway) and the W7 (192.168.2.2 255.255.255.0 with 192.168.2.2 gateway) they can ping tmeselves but not each other.

This to me should work - is it a routing issues with the multiple network cards?

Any hints?  Basically I want the w7 machine to be able to communicate back to the host without having to go through the router (which is at 100MBPS) - it should theoretically be at 1GBPS possible 10GBPS speeds.