Well, I've never served a Website from Windose, nor would I recommend it to anyone.
However, I do know how to do this with a Ubuntu Virtual Machine in Parallels.
1/ First make sure your webserver is working in your virtual machine - http://localhost should give you the Apache page for instance.
2/ open the terminal or command line and type:
ifconfig -a
(in Windows this command is : ipconfig /all ) (and please don't ask me why Windows wants to do this differently).
and note what it says - you need the IP of the 'ethernet' device if you are using bridged ethernet Networking. Here it is from my Virtual Machine, your results will probably be different :
Code:
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:C4:E0:1D:F1:DC
inet addr:10.0.1.3 Bcast:255.255.255.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::2c4:e0ff:fe1d:f1dc/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:51960 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:40250 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:75109989 (71.6 MiB) TX bytes:3244243 (3.0 MiB)
Interrupt:10 Base address:0x1080
The IP is the number after 'inet addr:', that is to say 10.0.1.3.
3. Now go to your Safari browser and simply type in the IP:
http://10.0.1.3
You will then get the index page of your Parallels VM webserver.
Of course this is quite simplified. If you want to do domain lookups, virtual hosts, etc., you need to do some more work, perhaps with a hosts file, etc.
Hope this helps somewhat.