Here's how I have my virtual lab setup. I'm just going to show my host and one guest configuration.

My LAN consist of few machines so I assigned a subnet of 192.168.1.33/29. My SOHO router (192.168.1.33) dynamically assigns IP addresses to the local machines. Currently the host machine (Windows) has an IP address of (192.168.1.37):


When I installed the VMware player it automatically created 2 virtual interfaces (VMnet1 & VMnet8)  in my host machine. It randomly assigned IP address to both virtual NIC. As I also understand the VMnet8 is used to connect the Internet:


Then I downloaded VMX Builder to create virtual machines which will be my guests to the host machine. For this example I used BackTrack to install it as a virtual machine and did the following steps below so that it can have access to my other physical machines in the LAN and the Internet:


Notice that my guest OS has no IP address. I statically assigned an IP address of (192.168.214.3). Remember that VMnet8 in my host machine has IP (192.168.214.1) since this virtual NIC is used to access the Internet I assigned an IP within that subnet to my guest OS. I did not use IP (192.168.214.2) because VMware use this as a virtual gateway:


Let's check the routing table for this guest machine:


Looking at the routing table I can see that I can send packets to (192.168.214.0) subnet via the eth0 interface. If I create additional virtual machines and statically assigned IP address within this subnet then my packets will reach them. However, I see there's no way for my packets to reach the Internet. Need to add an entry to the routing table:


I added a default gateway which is (192.168.214.2) the virtual VMware gateway. Now any packets destined to (0.0.0.0-what ever IP) but not 192.168.214.0/24 and 127.0.0.0/8 will be routed to (192.168.214.2) gateway via eth0 then from there to my host machine which will NAT (my VMware is set to NAT) the source IP with the IP of my host machine. If the packet is intended for the Internet then this packet will be routed to my SOHO router and off it goes.

Lets test by pinging my router:


Awesome it works : )

Now when I fired up my browser to request this site's page, I was receiving connection errors. I used tcpdump to see what was happening and noticed that my guest OS was trying to resolve the domain name to IP using an non-existing  DNS server so I configured the resolv.conf to add my DNS server IP (10.0.0.138). I got this IP from my host (Windows) configuration:


And boom it worked. Now I can access to the Internet from my virtual OS.

I hope this helps.