Student Questions on VMWARE

[Vaughan01]

Hi Every-one

My name is Vaughan. I was just wondering if anyone could help me with something.

I was wondering how you are able to upload vmware images to your hard drive as if they were operating systems, For example when I put on my PC the system will ask me what image I wish to load as if there where multiple operating systems on my machine. When I choose one it automatically opens the vmware software and the operating system I have on that particular vmware image. I need quite a few images on my computer for studies and would like to load all my vmware modules on my computer and begin my activities without having to install a particular operating system just to complete an activity, For example the module I'm on right know is Network Operating Systems and one of the images I need to load is an image that will take me through the installation of Windows 2008 R2 the next couple of activities will be where I need an image of a preinstalled Windows 2008 image to do configurations on and then a preinstalled image of windows 7 to configure to network to the windows 2008 server and many more images like these, that's why I would like to configure a hard drive with all the images preloaded so when I turn my PC on I can then just choose the image I need to work on. Is some-one able to guide me through this.

Kind Regards

Vaughan Testa

[weinstein5]

Welcome to the Community - A VM is a machine - so you will need to build VMs with the operating systems you need for your labs. The VM is compromised of a set of fails that you will store on your disk. If you are looking for prebuilt VMs you can check the VM Market place - that works well open source operating systems but windows you will need to license -

[Vaughan01]

Thanks for the info, it really helps, I'm still not 100% sure on how you would load each if the vm's onto the hard drive. Is it the same as loading on an operating system or is it different. When I put all the vm's on the drive will it boot directly from those images or will I first have to go into the drive and then select the image. I know it seems like to much step by step info but I would like to learn and unfortunately there are no videos I've found so far on this subject.

Thanks

Vaughan

[weinstein5 · Accepted solution]

When you create a VM a number of files are created including the configuration file which contains the information about the VM and has an extension of .VMX and tthe virtual disk or disks which is where the files of the VM including the OS are stored. Using workstation you will start the VM which will load the VM into memory allowing it to boot form the virtual disks - Workstation software will schedule the use of the physical memory,  CPU, network between the running VMs -

You might want to check out chapter 3 of http://pubs.vmware.com/workstation-11/topic/com.vmware.ICbase/PDF/ws11-getting-started.pdf for more information about VMs

[Vaughan01]

Thank You for the information It was really helpful.