Connect to server in VMWare player while host is not connected to a network

Question

I have a linux server VM on my host machine using VMWare player and if I'm on a network, I can connect to the web server on the VM via a web browser. However, I tried to do the same while I was disconnected from a network and I couldn't.

The networking is set to Host-only and I did use dhclient/ifconfig to make sure that yes, I did have an IP address assigned to the VM.

While I can work around this, the purpose of the VM is to allow us to demo our app from any machine and that machine may not be connected to a network.

Thanks.