Working on a project that has both Windows PHP and .Net applications and servers, as well, as an API written in Ruby, my development environment had to include Windows, in addition to the native Mac OSX 10.7. One of the requirements of the project is for the PHP code (running in a Windows VM) to call the Rails API (running in my Mac terminal), so I had to connect the VMWare Windows host through to OSX Lion.

• unblock the necessary ports you want to access on the Windows firewall (Control Panel > Windows Firewall)
• edit the \Windows\System32\Drivers\etc\hosts file for example 192.168.100.1 test.local.dev
• edit the Mac's /etc/hosts file with a host 192.168.100.1 test.local.dev