Testing IIS websites locally over virtual machines

Totally a guess: point the VM's browser to the host machine's IP address. E.g. opening http://192.168.0.101/ should get your website's index.htm page (if the host is at 192.168.0.1 of course)

If you're using the most common arrangement for VM networking, each of your VMs will be behind NAT, and will be running in its own little network world; from the VM point of view, your host machine is somewhere out there in the cloud. That means that the usual internal methods that Windows uses to associate a local machine's host name with its IP addresses are not available to the VMs. They can use those methods to associate their own names with their own IP addresses, but they need to do the same kind of lookup to find the IP address of the machine that hosts them as they would do for any other machine in the cloud. So you have some choices. From simplest to most complicated: you can (a) access your web server via its IP address, rather than by name (b) make an entry in each VM's HOSTS file (usually at C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\HOSTS) that associates a name with the server's IP address or (c) fiddle about with DNS. This last option will range from really easy to moderately annoying depending on how your VM hosting software deals with DNS.

If you have the VM set up to use NAT internally, it will take the internal IP of your host PC, then create a NAT network under that again (such as 10.0.0.x network), so you're effectively being NAT'd twice inside your VMs. You don't want this. The VM should be set up to bridge into your main internal network. This way, it should be able to access the entire internal network (usually 192.168.x.x). As an example for this, I modified a XP vm in VirualBox, added a network interface (kept the original NAT interface just in case), and told this new interface to bridge to my primary hardware NIC. When it started up, it got a DHCP address from my main router and I was able to connect to my local file server.