Host name resolution on a home network

WINS/NetBIOS is the traditional distributed "workgroup DNS" for small private networks. It's why you can see other computers in the "Network" on Windows.

If you have static IPs and don't change around your VMs or computers, then just making a quick hosts file and distributing that is a quick, easy and once over fix. "Visiting laptops" won't resolve to that of course.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hosts_file

Afterthought: If these are Windows computers, then simply enabling Network browsing, and file and printer sharing should do the trick.

DD-WRT might be the solution for this problem, from their About page:

DD-WRT is a third party developed firmware released under the terms of the GPL for many ieee802.11a/b/g/h/n wireless routers

It has a large set of features, including a small DNS server Dnsmask, which is bescribed as:

It is designed to provide DNS and, optionally, DHCP, to a small network. It can serve the names of local machines which are not in the global DNS. The DHCP server integrates with the DNS server and allows machines with DHCP-allocated addresses to appear in the DNS with names configured either in each host or in a central configuration file.

Here is the tutorial from their website on how to do that: DNSMasq As DHCP Server

Many routers do support this. Try to use telnet (or maybe ssh, if it supports that) to connect to your router, and look for a dns menu.