VMware Workstation provides an easy-to-use New Virtual Machine Wizard that steps you through creating VMs. When you create a VM, you set up its available RAM, virtual disk type, maximum disk size, and virtual networking options. VMware Workstation supports two types of virtual hard disks: virtual and raw. A virtual disk contains files that are typically stored on the host's hard disk. The host OS sees and accesses a virtual disk as a regular file. On the guest OS, all the VM information is stored on the virtual disk. By default, virtual disk files are sized only large enough to hold the guest OS but grow as new information is added until they reach their predefined maximum size. You can increase the performance of the guest OS by choosing to allocate all the virtual disk space when the VM is created. You can easily move virtual disks between different systems running VMware Workstation.
A raw disk is mapped to a physical drive on the host and directly accesses a local disk partition. Raw disks are useful in multiboot systems when you want to let the alternative OSs run concurrently with the host OS. You can set up virtual disks as either persistent (the OS saves all changes) or nonpersistent (the OS discards all changes). In addition, you can set up the VM to prompt you to save any virtual disk changes when the guest OS is powered off.
VMware Workstation's VMs support four types of virtual networking: None, Host-Only, Bridged, and Network Address Translation (NAT). The None option essentially means you can disable networking. Host-Only restricts the networking to only the VMs and the host OS with no outside connections, although you can configure outside connections by using either Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) or RRAS. Bridged networking lets VMware Workstation act as a virtual switch connecting the VMs to the outside network. The NAT option lets the VMs use the host IP address to connect to the outside network. VMware Workstation provides its own DHCP server for Host-Only and NAT configurations.
After you've created a VM, you can use the Virtual Machine Control Panel, which Figure 3 shows, to edit the VM's properties. To start the VM, you use the VMware Workstation window's Power On option (not shown in Figure 2). If no guest OS is installed, VMware Workstation prompts you to insert a boot CD-ROM (the CD-ROM with the OS you want to install). You can either install the guest OS from the virtual CD-ROM drive or mount an International Organization for Standardization (ISO) CD-ROM image file and install the OS from the CD-ROM image. After you've installed the guest OS, powering on is just like booting the OS.
After you install the guest OS, you can opt to install the VMware Tools component in the guest OS. Although the guest OS can run without VMware Tools, the tools offer some important enhancements to the basic VMware Workstation VM, such as an enhanced SVGA driver to improve video performance. (VMwareTools is required if you want the VM to support SVGA graphics.) VMware Tools provides a control panel that lets you synchronize the time between the VM and host and resize the virtual disk. VMware Tools also lets you copy information between VMs.
In my tests, the VMware Workstation VMs performed well compared with running a physical system with the same OS. Operationally, the only significant difference between running a VM and a physical system is that in a VM, the Ctrl+Alt+Ins key combination replaces the Ctrl+Alt+Del key combination. I accessed the CD-ROM drive seamlessly in the VMs and found that the VMs fully supported USB devices, such as flash memory keys.
After you create a VM, you can easily move it. VMware Workstation defines a VM by three basic files and extensions. The .vmdk file contains the virtual hard disk image, the .vmx file stores the VM configuration information, and the .nvram file stores information about the state of the VM's BIOS. To move a VM, simply copy the .vmdk and .vmx files to the new host. You can even copy VM files between Windows and Linux hosts.
The main limitation of VMware Workstation is that only 1GB of RAM is available to all VMs, which limits the number of VMs that can run simultaneously. XP and other platforms support as much as 4GB of RAM. VMware plans to address the memory limitation in the next release of VMware Workstation. For more information about the upcoming release of VMware Workstation, see the sidebar "VMware Workstation 4.5."
One significant advantage of VMware Workstation over Virtual PC is its support for virtual SCSI, which lets you use a VM to set up and test Microsoft Windows clusters. VMware Workstation's virtual SCSI support lets you set up a quorum resource drive that VMs can share. (Actually, VMware Workstation doesn't officially support virtual SCSI, but you can use virtual SCSI devices with the product. For more information about using virtual SCSI with VMware Workstation, see "A VMware Clustering Recipe," February 2003, InstantDoc ID 37599.)
The VMware Workstation documentation is outstanding. The 326-page user manual summarizes the VMware Workstation features and guides you through the product's setup and common usage scenarios. The online Help is thorough and equally impressive. VMware's Web site (http://www.vmware.com/support) and the public newsgroups that VMware runs at vmware.for-windowsnt.general also provide much useful information about setting up and running VMware Workstation.
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