Book Image

VMware Workstation - No Experience Necessary

By : Sander van Vugt
Book Image

VMware Workstation - No Experience Necessary

By: Sander van Vugt

Overview of this book

VMware Workstation runs on Linux as well as Windows hosts and handles different virtual machine formats, which allows you to share your work with users of other virtualization platforms, including VirtualBox, VMware Player, and VMware vSphere environments. VMware Workstation - No Experience Necessary helps you in getting started with VMware Workstation. You'll learn how to install VMware Workstation in any circumstance, and how to create virtual machines and keep different configurations for each virtual machine, which helps in setting up extensive test environments. You'll also learn how to share these virtual machines with users of other virtualization products as well as the cloud. In VMware Workstation - No Experience Necessary you'll start learning about different virtualization solutions. In this introduction you'll learn how VMware Workstation differs from other workstation virtualization platforms such as Oracle Virtual Box, and from data centre virtualization solutions such as VMware vSphere. Next, you'll learn how to install VMware Workstation on either a Windows or a Linux host and how to create virtual machines on these host platforms. After installing virtual machines, you'll learn about advanced virtual machine features, including advanced networking and storage setups, which allow you to mirror a data centre setup as closely as possible. An important part of the setup of such an environment is working with snapshots and clones, which is discussed in detail. You'll also learn how to use virtual machines that are created on other host computers. The final part of the book teaches you how to share virtual machines with others. You'll learn how to upload virtual machines to VMware vSphere, and how to share virtual machines with users of VMware Player.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
VMware Workstation – No Experience Necessary
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Starting the installation


To start the installation of virtual machines, you need to navigate to File | New Virtual Machine. This starts New Virtual Machine Wizard. The wizard proposes two different options: you can select Typical if you want to have your virtual machine up and running as fast as possible, or select Custom if you want maximum control over the options that you'll use in the virtual machine. In this procedure, you'll read about how to install a custom virtual machine.

After selecting the custom installation type, you need to specify the virtual machine's hardware compatibility. By default, the VM will install as a VMware Workstation 9 virtual machine type, which is fine if you just want to use it on VMware Workstation 9. However, this VM type won't work on previous versions of VMware Workstation. VMware Workstation 9 uses a new data format that cannot be used on any previous versions of VMware Workstation. For this reason, you can select the lowest version of VMware Workstation...