Creating a VMWare Image without VMWare Server

Yesterday one of my friend wanted to know how to create a VMWare image. I thought it might be a good idea to write a post about this on my blog. Even though there are many blogs out there that have already explained how to make a VMWare image, it will be easy for me to just point my friends to this URL next time someone asks me about it.

The easiest way to create a vm image is to use easyvmx. Just start by creating a .vmx configuration file by simply filling out this online configuration form:

http://www.easyvmx.com/easyvmx.shtml.
Today we will create gentoo linux vm.

1. Baisc Info:
Remember that if you are going to use VMWare Player, you must specify
# of CPUs = 1, as VMWare Player does not support more than 1 CPU. The Guest OS can be a 64bit machine as well, but I haven’t tested it yet though.

2. Network configuration:
I have tried Intel Pro/1000 and vlance with NAT and Bridged network and they both seem to work fine.

3. Disk configuration: I generally use 10GB for my VM because nowadays 4.7GB seems little less for modern OSes. I have also read that making the disk SCSI type will improve your VMWare disk performance.

4. CD ROM: You will probably need two of them one for mounting/loading ISO images and another for loading physical CDs/DVDs. NOTE: When using VMWre player, you’ll need to change the ISO image in the configuration file manually to load an ISO image. For example you can set the ISO to install-x86-minimal-2007.0-r1.iso and boot the vm to install gentoo from this iso.The physical cdrom is used to load CDs from your existing cdrom/dvd drive.

You can leave rest of the options un-touched. and Click the “Create Virtual Machine” button. Download the configuration that we created here:

http://www.mediafire.com/?5f9d3711d6m (Gentoo_2007.zip, 77Kb).

Also, for people who don’t want to go through all this configuration and then installing the OS itself, there’s a completely configured Gentoo 2007.0 vmware image ready to use. You can download it from here:

http://thepiratebay.org/tor/3723438/Gentoo_2007.0_VMWare_Image(gentoo.zip, 1.95 GB torrent).

Once you download either of the above you must either get theVMWare Player (free version) or the VMWare Server or VMWare Workstation (retail versions can create, manage, compress vmware images and much more). For a n00b I would recommend to get the VMWare Player. Then open the .vmx file from the zip file above using VMWare Player (or VmWare Server).