Unable to ping between host machines and guest vms running on Vmware

In order to learn a bit about system administration, I've installed a Centos vm using Vmware on my local machine running Windows 7. Everything seems to be working fine since I can access the internet from the Centos machine, but I am unable to ping the host machine from the vm or vice versa. I get the message "destination host unreachable". I also have a win7 vm and I run into the same problem when attempting to ping between it and the host. There's a third computer on the network which is able to ping both of the vms and the host machine. The vms are also able to ping this other computer. The only problem I have with pinging seems to happen between the host and the vms. When I switch the vm network adapter over to NAT, the problem goes away and I'm able to ping successfully.

As I understand it, this should be working since the bridged vm is supposed to act like another physical device on the network.

AHA! After over 10 hours of trying to figure this out, I finally got it.

All I had to do was disable the "DNE LightWeight Filter" by right-clicking my network adapter and going to properties. This is apparently a driver by the company Citrix, which must have been installed for the SonicWall vpn I use.

In most cases this is Firewall who is causing troubles. Try to turn it off on the host and virtual machine and ping it again, than if it helps, turn it back on and configure Firewall rules accordingly.

Go to Edit -> Virtual Network Editor and try to change your bridged network adapter (don't use automatic)