VMware Player

A few months ago, VMware released a free version of its desktop virtualization software, VMware Player. http://software.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=06/01/05/175233&tid=130 It's a great application for running a second operating system on your desktop; the only problem is you can't create new virtual images using VMware Player. With a little work, however, you can use VMware Player to create guest operating systems.

The easiest way to get a virtual image is to have someone with VMware Workstation create one for you, or to download a pre-made image from VMware. If you don't know anyone with a copy of Workstation, or the OS you want isn't available as a VMware appliance, you're out of luck.

If you plan to make extensive use of VMware, go ahead and buy a copy of VMware Workstation. It's much easier to use VMware Workstation to create virtual machines than to do it manually. Also, Workstation has a number of features you won't find in VMware Player, such as the ability to take snapshots of the guest OS, take movies of the virtual machine, and use virtual SMP.

But VMware Player will get the job done if you just want to run a virtual host under Linux or Windows. You can also modify your virtual machines for VMware Workstation using the tips here for VMware Player, but you should be able to do most if not all of this through the VMware Workstation GUI. I'll walk through the process of creating a guest OS on Linux; this should also work under Windows, but you may need to change things such as pathnames.

To do this, you'll need to have Qemu installed. Specifically, you'll need the qemu-img program that creates disk images for Qemu. This handy application writes disk images in several formats, including VMware's. To create a disk image, run qemu-img create -f vmdk imagename.vmdk nG, where n is the size of the disk image you want to create. Note that the size of the disk image is the size it can eventually grow to — not the size it will be when it's first created. So, if you create a 20G image, it will only occupy about 3MB on disk without any data.

Once you've created the image, you'll need to modify the configuration file to tell VMware Player about it. First, comment out all the lines that […]

Why go through all this fuss when VMware Server is free (as in beer)? I've been using it on my workstation successfully for weeks.

By Anonymous Reader on 2006.06.14

I have also been using VMWare Server, which is just as free as VMWare Player. No reason to manally hack the config files, when the more capable app is free.

One interesting feature that I haven't seen before is that you can connect to the virtual machine over the network. It's kind of like combining qemu and vnc into one product.

By Anonymous Reader on 2006.06.14

Why go through all this fuss when QEMU [bellard.free.fr] is free (as in freedom)? I've been using it on my desktop successfully for years.

Quick start:

Install QEMU:

# aptitude install qemu
# emerge qemu
# yum install qemu
# cd /usr/pkgsrc/emulators/qemu && make install clean clean-depends

Create a hard disk image (900MB):

$ dd if=/dev/zero of=img bs=1M count=900

Install the operating system:

$ qemu -cdrom install.iso -hda img -boot d

Run the operating system:

$ qemu -hda img -net user -net nic

There are, of course, more options (copy-on-write disk images, networking, saving and loading VM state, serial console, …); see the documentation [bellard.free.fr] for details.

If QEMU isn't fast enough, there's an optional proprietary accelerator: kqemu [bellard.free.fr]

and a free one: qvm86 http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/qvm86/

By Anonymous Reader on 2006.06.14