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

Creating clones


A snapshot is a virtual machine that is in a specific state. When working with snapshots, there will still be one virtual machine that can easily be restored to a specific state. The major difference between a clone and a snapshot is that a clone is a new virtual machine that is independent of the original virtual machine. Even if there is some relation between a snapshot and a clone (for instance, you can create a clone based on a snapshot), a clone basically is a new virtual machine. This means that once you have created a clone of a virtual machine, you can even start creating new snapshots of that virtual machine.

When creating clones, you really need to think well about what you want to use them for. If you just want to use them for your own convenience, a linked clone is the best solution. It can be created very fast, and it takes the least possible amount of disk space while it still offers full functionality. The major difference though is that you'll never be able...