I am installing Sun Solaris 10 x86 as a guest operating system on my new VMWare workstation platform. Once installed I will try to access the physical network interface in the host PC via virtual NIC bridging. If all goes according to plan, the Solaris 10 guest OS will have network access and my media center PC software 
will continue to function and deliver content to my Xbox 360 extenders.
update: Things appear to be working as expected. Solaris 10 network works fine and was allocated an IP address from the DHCP server on the physical network’s router.