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 VMware Workstation files


After a virtual machine has been installed, different files are copied to the host computer. On Linux, by default these files are stored in the folder vmware that is created in the home folder of the user who creates the files. On Windows, a folder with the name Virtual Machines is created in the Documents folder. This folder contains the complete virtual machine configuration.

The main configuration file of the virtual machine is in the .vmx file. Associated with that is a .vmxf file in which the version of virtual hardware used is listed. Then there is the .log file containing log messages related to the virtual machine, and as the last part of the virtual machine files, there are the .vmdk files that are used as a virtual disk in the virtual machine. Associated files will be present as well; these are used to represent the current state of a virtual machine and they are not as important as the other files.

One file type that might be relevant however...