Hi Matthew,
VMware is a
virtualization software that makes it possible to have several operating systems running on a single machine. I've just looked up if there's anything specific about VMware ESX and the trick with it is that it runs in hostless mode, i.e. it does not use an underlying operating system. This is different to hosted mode in which another VMware product, GSX, runs on top of host OS - Linux or Windows.
As you can see in the
Wikipedia page secion about VMware core design, VMware software virtualizes different aspects of machine it runs on and it includes network adapter and network connections created on top of it.
Digging deeper into
ESX LabManager feature list I can tell that network works in the same manner.
My recommendation is that you first check your network connection inside your ESX LabManager instance and make sure it works prior to running soapUI and adding a WSDL. One of the most popular and simplest ways to do this is to run a command line and run:
ping www.google.com
If Google servers reply to your ping requests, then you can try to access the WSDL from a web browser by copy-pasting its URL.
Please let us know if this has helped.
Cheers!
/Nenad Nikolic a.k.a. Shonzilla