Using VMWare Fusion with external Drives

[ProJectTechAnsw]

I have been a user of VMWare Workstation for some time. In a windows environment, I was able to save primary drive space by moving my virtual machines to an external drive. I am looking to do something similar with VMWare Fusion. I am looking for some guidance since I have not yet purchased the product and I don't want to crater my MacBook. Does anyone have any insight into my concern?

[WoodyZ]

Frankly you have nothing to be concerned about. You can download Fusion and try it free for 30 days just like you can with Workstation.

Also I move Virtual Machines between Workstation and Fusion and visa verse on external drives and the network and run then from both as well.

[rcardona2k]

I do this all the time but my external drive is a Mac-formatted HFS+ volume. I create, copy ane archive test VMs (Win7 flavors, Ubuntu, and Fedora). In my archive I have Win2000, 98, FreeBSD and many flavors of Linux. If I intended to share these machines with Workstation I would format my drive as FAT32 and make sure my virtual disks are in split 2 GB format. My OS X uid is the same on all my Macs but if it wasn't I could change owernship (chown) the files as root and fix that.

For VMs brought over from Workstation, make sure you don't have any host-dependent device paths and convert them to Fusion VM bundles by appending .vmwarevm to the enclosing directory (folder name).

[rnoddy]

Not only can you but the VM on an external drive, this is a better configuration. Switching between the macOS and Fusion will be much fast as the disk thrashes a lot less.