found my problem, in the VMPlayer settings - hardware - network adapter2 - the network connection needs to be bridged, not nat, once I changed that, the traffic started working in/out of the vm. thanks All :-)
Team, I'm running this on VMPlayer 7.1, I can bring up the gui from the host machine and also putty session, and can ping all the interfaces from within the putty session, but cannot ping the external gateway address... hopefully it's something simple. I have a similar one that was built by an Isilon enginner that's still working, but so far everything seems similiar - ie interface and route table settings. Let me know please if any ideas, thanks.
No external traffic for EMC_Isilon_OneFS_7.1.1.2_Simulator