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

Performing common tasks


Even the most common tasks can be different in a virtual machine. It starts with the virtual machine window itself. Once you're on it, the mouse cursor is captured. That means you'll need to apply a special trick to get back to the host operating system. The common way to do this is by pressing Ctrl + Alt at the same time. But what if in the virtual operating system, the Ctrl + Alt keys sequence has a specific meaning? If that's the case, you'll need to define the hot keys that are used in your virtual environment. To do this, apply the following procedure:

  1. From the Edit menu, select the Preferences option.

  2. In the bar on the left of the screen, select Hot Keys.

  3. You'll now see the interface that is shown in the following screenshot. By default, the Ctrl + Alt keys are used as the virtual machine hotkeys, and specific manipulations are assigned to these hotkeys.

  4. Click on the hotkeys that you want to be redefined. For instance, if you want to use Shift + Win as the default...