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 snapshots


In this section, you'll learn how to create snapshots of virtual machines. You'll also learn how to use the Snapshot Manager to manage a setup where different snapshots are used.

Creating snapshots

To create a snapshot, you don't have to do anything with the virtual machine. You can create a snapshot irrespective of the actual state of the virtual machine, so it doesn't matter if it is currently active or not. If the machine is powered on, the current state of the virtual machine memory is included in the snapshot as well. This is a useful feature as it allows you to return to the exact state the machine was in while taking the snapshot.

To create a snapshot of a virtual machine, select the virtual machine first. Then from the VM menu, navigate to Snapshot | Take snapshot. Here you are presented with a small dialog box where you can enter a short description of the snapshot. You should always enter some description as it may be clear now what the snapshot is being used...