crosspost from http://rextang.net/blogs/work/
It's nice to have VMWare Player for free, to be able to install on any pc for virtualization. VMWare Server 1.0 is also free but can only run on server platform instead of windows xp. For a corp development environment that can only use corp licensed software, VMWare Player and VMWare Server become a perfect choice for dev env virtualization. it's free, so it's legal to use inside a company. nice marketing idea...
Although VMWare Player is free, it's functions are limited and not much like VMWare workstation (that lovely traversable multi-snapshot). basically, it's really just a player to play a vmware disk image. although VMWare player is lack of VM settings GUI, we can actually tune the VM settings by editing it's configuration .vmx file.
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier on NewsForge wrote a nice article about hacking VMWare Player .vmx files to add devices / disks by oneself. tips are:
- Download pre-made vm image from vmware appliances site to get ready-to-use VMs as samples
- Create own VMWare vmdk disk image by using Qemu tool
- Sample .vmx template to create new VMs by just using text editor
The sample .vmx template is like this (from NewsForge article):
config.version = "8"
virtualHW.version = "4"
memsize = "256"
ide0:0.present = "TRUE"
ide0:0.fileName = "newvm.vmdk"
ide1:0.present = "TRUE"
ide1:0.fileName = "/path/to/iso"
ide1:0.deviceType = "cdrom-image"
floppy0.fileName = "/dev/fd0"
ethernet0.present = "TRUE"
usb.present = "TRUE"
sound.present = "TRUE"
sound.virtualDev = "es1371"
displayuName = "Test Machine"
guestOS = "otherlinux"
scsi0:0.redo = ""
ethernet0.addressType = "generated"
displayName = "DisplayName"
checkpoint.vmState = "test.vmss"
ide0:0.redo = ""
Check Joe's article for more information about editing the config file of VMWare Player.
Basically, VMWare player had all the basic VM functions provided by VMWare Workstation, so I suppose all the hardware virtualization devices are able to add (multiple) in VMWare player.
By the way, Microsoft Virtual PC is also free now. Virtual Server 2005 is also free to use on Windows 2003 Datacenter Edition.
[--- Update ---]
Another Tip: As VMWare Player will not allow one to switch cd-rom images when the VM is running, like what VMWare workstation can do, it's better to set VM's ide1 to auto-detect host machine's cd-rom drive, no matter it's a real cd-rom drive or a virtual cd-rom drive created by software like Daemon Tools (free!), thus when installing software that needs to switch disks or iso images, one can use host's drive to switch, just like what VMWare workstation simulated for users.
[--- Update ---]
Technorati Tags: virtualization , vm , vmware