Running a VMware Player Virtual Machine to run a Driver Station

[Philip Arola]

My laptop is running Windows 8, but would rather have the Driver Station running in a VM (due to licensing issues with NI software, something about hardware changes) (I have Windows 7 Pro running in a VM). The network properly works when connecting to the Internet, and I can browse and download properly. However, I am wondering if anyone here has managed to use a VMware Player VM as a driver Station.
I have seen it done in Parallels with no special configurations, but I don't really want to pay for that. Does one have to configure the IPs of the host network adapters for the VM a certain way?
I have no qualms with doing this in depth tweaking, I know how to revert back and reinstall software if needed.