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

Understanding when to apply which tools


A snapshot is a photo of a state of a virtual machine. As a virtual machine often requires a lot of work before a desired state of the machine is reached, it is a good idea to take a picture of that exact state. If something goes wrong at a later stage, having a snapshot makes it possible to easily revert to the previous state of the virtual machine. So the base concept of working with snapshots is to make it easier to revert to a previous state.

A clone is a copy of a virtual machine. Using clones is convenient if several virtual machines are needed, with more or less the same configuration on each virtual machine. By cloning a virtual machine, you'll make a copy of the actual state of a machine. After making the clone, you'll just have to modify the properties of the virtual machine that need to be unique on that machine.

In some ways, clones and snapshots are closely related. This is because you can create a clone of a snapshot of a virtual machine...