Bridge Windows 8 Guest in OSX Mountain Lion Host Virtual Machine for local development

Question

I'm trying to test in a local development environment before committing to my team's repository. Host OS - OS X 10.8.2 Mountain Lion Guest OS - Windows 8

I am running VMWare Fusion 5 as a virtual machine. The VM Network Adapter is configured as bridged -> autodetect.

I browse to my development web files in the host os at localhost:8080

I CAN hit the internet, google.com, etc from my guest os. However browsing my host's local IP address at that port (10.16.30.4:8080) brings up nothing. In fact, Internet Explorer tries to do a bing search.

What else must I configure to be able to hit localhost:8080 from my Windows 8 guest os?

Answer 1

So I found a workaround but I don't know why it works.

1. Install Chrome
2. Point Chrome to [host ip]:8080
3. The site works
4. Open IE
5. Point IE to [host ip]:8080
6. The site works

Omitting steps 1-3 will result in IE doing a Bing search for your local ip address