It's great to hear this is working now. Sadly, I've only been using VMware for a few weeks myself and therefore am not accustomed to giving exact "step-by-step" instructions on how to set the parameters. It's great that you persisted and figured it out.
NAT stands for Network Address Translation. Virtually all home gateway routers use this (very old and established) technique to connect your home Internet Service Provider to the computers in your home.
In your case, the host computer has an IP address that is officially assigned through DHCP by the network operators. Your Guest OS is sitting inside (and hidden by) the Host OS. Your Guest OS is given a totally different IP address that is not consistent with, or recognized by the network operators. When your Guest OS wants to send something, it sends the IP packets to the NAT software. The NAT software modifies the outgoing packets and puts the IP address of the host in the source address field of all the packets. This way, the rest of network thinks your Host OS is the one that's sending the packets. This makes your network operators happy. When the response from other computers come back to the Host, the NAT software keeps track if the packet really needs to go back to the Guest OS and send it there if needed. How the NAT software keeps track of the packets and if they belong to the Host or Guest is part of the stateful nature of it's job. It's actually called NATP (P=Port Translation). If someone on the outside network sends unsolicited packets to the Host that are intended for the Guest, the NAT software won't know if it belongs to the Host or Guest. For this reason, NAT can only keep track of the packets that are initially sent by your Guest OS.
Suggest you do Internet search on NATP and NAT to get greater insight.
Regards
Ray
PS: If this is worth clicking the Kudo's check box, please do so...
