This question is very similar to this one, except the host machine is Windows Server 2003 instead of OSX.
Essentially I need to be able to SSH (via cygwin and/or PuTTy) from the host machine into a CentOS guest using only its host name, not IP (due to DHCP). We have older VM images on there where this already works, however when using the new VMs you can only have access to it by it's IP address. I've been digging around trying to figure out whoever set those old ones up enabled access by hostname (there's no entry in the windows "hosts" file), but so far have no luck.
It is running inside VMPlayer 3.1.0 using NAT as its networking type.
Edit
Since it is using NAT as its networking type, nslookup can't find the machine since the VM is sharing its connection with the host. Here is the results of a ping -a, note that this is with cygwin on the host machine, I don't know if there is a similar flag for windows since cygwin just uses the windows native ping command.
$ ping -a [guest_machine_name]
Pinging [guest_machine_name] [192.168.0.129] with 32 byte
Reply from 192.168.0.129: bytes=32 time=1ms TTL=6
Reply from 192.168.0.129: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=6
Reply from 192.168.0.129: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=6
Reply from 192.168.0.129: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=6
Ping statistics for 192.168.0.129:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0%
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 0ms, Maximum = 1ms, Average = 0ms
Also, there is no difference between network settings in the VM images from what I can tell (VMWare settings, the Gnome Network Config app's settings, /etc/hosts, /etc/ssh/sshd_config, basically anything somewhat related that I could find). I removed all iptables rules permanantly and disabled SELinux, as I thought that could be a cause of the issue, but still no luck.
