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

Working with hardware


Each virtual machine has hardware assigned. You have selected the hardware that you want to use while creating the virtual machine. On an installed virtual machine, you will frequently modify hardware settings as well. On some occasions, it will be necessary to assign a new virtual hardware but common tasks such as booting from a CD-ROM requires some specific action as well.

Booting your virtual machine from a CD-ROM

There are different ways to boot a virtual machine. You can either use a physical CD-ROM or a DVD disk or as an alternative, you can boot from an ISO file. Using ISO files is useful, as you don't have to make sure the physical disk is present for all operations you want to perform.

To tell your virtual machine where it needs to boot from, boot into BIOS to change the boot order. To enter the BIOS setup for the guest operating system, navigate to VM | Power | Power On to BIOS.

Note

To make the boot delay a bit longer, you can add the following to the VMX file...