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 a V2V conversion and virtual machine import


In the preceding sections, you've learned how to convert a physical computer into a virtual machine. Occasionally, you'll also need to import virtual machine files in VMware Workstation. This can be because you have copied a VMDK file from another computer to your VMware Workstation computer, but you may also need this approach to import a virtual machine file that has been created on another virtualization platform. In this section you'll learn how to perform both of these tasks.

Importing raw image files into VMware Workstation

The easiest way to convert a raw disk file to VMDK is by using the vmware-vdiskmanager utility. You can use this tool both on the Linux as well as the Windows versions of VMware. The following procedure demonstrates how to convert a raw disk file to VMDK:

  1. Attach the medium that contains the raw disk file that you have created to your computer, and make sure it is accessible by either a drive letter (Windows) or...