How to bypass vpn talking to VMWare Guest?

Greetings. Network/VPN n00b question here.

I'm running VMWare Workstation with a Guest Windows 2003 Server. It has SQL Server 2000 installed. The sole purpose for this Guest is to house SQL Server... it needn't have internet access or access to any other resources on the network other than the host.

When launch Check Point VPN software, the host routes through the company network before it connects to the guest ... i.e. it's no longer a direct connection. I assume this is just how things are supposed to work.

However, what's happening is that the connection between my host and the SQL Server instance on the guest intermittently drops. It's not consistent, and some databases on the server will be responsive while others aren't. It appears that the databases with the most traffic on the guest (the ones I'm hitting with load tests) are the ones that become intermittently unresponsive.

This problem only manifests when VPN is on; when it's off, I can pound away on this database with no troubles.

Thanks for any advice!

From serverfault marc esher

• Taking a wild guess here, but you may want to limit the amount of memory sql server is using with this setting.

  If the checkpoint VPN client has a large enough memory footprint, you may be starving your VPN client for memory which is causing the intermittent network issues i.e. memory is being paged out.

  From Nick Kavadias

• It's strange that the problem would be intermittent.

  I am not personally familiar with the Check Point software, but some VPN clients are configured to send all outbound traffic through the VPN until you disconnect. This obviously can interfere with your ability to access local resources.

  The standard workaround for this type of problem is to run the VPN client in a virtual machine instead of on the host. This guarantees that the host machine's networking configuration remains unchanged. (Bridged networking may be necessary in order to avoid double-NAT issues.)

  From Miles Erickson