Question about basic setup of BigIP

All, I am trying to setup a BigIP loadbalancer I have installed under VMWare. My ultimate goal is to work out a problem one of our customers has with SSL offloading. This is the first time I have seen BigIP and have only a working knowledge of networking so please bear with me. I want my laptop to connect to another (running our server software) via the loadbalancer. I need only one virtual server and one pool member I would think since I am not trying the load-balancing feature but the offloading one. The VMWare workstation ipconfig looks like this:

 

 

Ethernet adapter Local Area Connection: Connection-specific DNS Suffix . : Link-local IPv6 Address . . . . . : fe80::c444:157:5594:711d%10 IPv4 Address. . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.0.3 Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0 Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.0.1 ... Ethernet adapter VMware Network Adapter VMnet1: Connection-specific DNS Suffix . : Link-local IPv6 Address . . . . . : fe80::d19d:8908:99db:e948%23 IPv4 Address. . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.40.1 Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0 Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : Ethernet adapter VMware Network Adapter VMnet8: Connection-specific DNS Suffix . : Link-local IPv6 Address . . . . . : fe80::5c8f:338d:74bb:6694%25 IPv4 Address. . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.235.1 Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0 Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : So my laptop's ip is 192.168.0.03. The target laptop's is 192.168.0.13. My (limited) understanding led me to believe that I should define the external VLAN to have VMNet1 IP: 192.168.40.1 and the internal one to VMNet8: 192.168.235.1. I then set up a Virtual server with the same IP as the VMNet1 and a pool with one member, namely the other laptop's: 192.168.0.13. The server on the target laptop is set up to only accept connections on port 8000 and only of the origin is a specific hostname, namely bigipvirtual.local so I set up an entry in the hosts file (on my laptop) for that name pointing to VMNet1 (192.168.40.1). I have SNAT set to "AutoMap". I can ping the other laptop from the bigip VMWare instance and from my laptop. I can use curl on the bigip instance to get the html content my server serves upon port 8000 but cannot do the same on my laptop. I get "Connection refused". I can ping the VMWare VMNet1 from my laptop. I cannot however ping from my laptop to the other laptop via the BigIP. I get "connection refused". I have a number of questions: 1) Are my assumptions correct? Should the VLANs be setup this way or should I not use the VMWare VMNet adapter IPs? 2) Should the Virtual server have the same IP as the VMNet1? I can ping that from outside of VMWare, from my laptop's command shell. If I set it to an arbitrary IP I cannot ping it from the outside so that doesn't work for me right now. 3) How do I see what connections have arrived to the load-balancer? I see the logs in the management UI but I see no connections from my laptop. Regards --Jan