FreeBSD guest under Windows XP host?

Thread was moved from "General Discussions > User Solutions and Workarounds" to "Parallels Workstation for Windows and Linux > General Questions".
Stacey M

Right now I have two machines - a Windows XP box and a FreeBSD box. The FreeBSD box handles all of my mail, DNS, web hosting, greylisting (for email), NAT, DHCP, and provides routing for my privately networked computers. Last night I took a look at Parallels Desktop and am impressed enough by it that I'd like to try to combine both machines.

My question is as follows: Right now my FreeBSD box has two ethernet controllers in it. One network is my internet uplink, and the other is my private LAN. The Windows XP box is just connected to the private LAN, with its address being obtained from the FreeBSD box via DHCP.

I'd like to move my FreeBSD server to my Windows XP box and run FreeBSD as a guest OS to combine machines, and save me about $10/month in power. ;-) Plus, I like the fact that I can simply back up a single file and my system is backed up - no need to bring it down!

So I guess my question is, how do I best approach this? XP Needs to obtain an IP address from the guest FreeBSD box for its private LAN address, and that network needs to be fed to a physical NIC. Can I dedicate a single NIC for FreeBSD's public IP address, and dedicate the other one to the private network?

Any pointers on how to properly set this up would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!