Working in a Virtual World

Thought you could only play media files on your PC? Wrong! You can also play virtual machines now, with VMWare Player

Sunday, December 18, 2005

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In our September issue, we had done a story on 'Server Consolidation and Virtualization' and covered all the available virtualization technologies. We also implemented a few popular virtualization solutions, both free and commercial and discussed the benefits you can derive by virtualizing servers in your organization. To extend that a little further, we show you a way of emulating virtual machines without investing in software. VMWare Player is a free application from VMWare that runs a virtual machine using images created with VMWare Workstation and the GSX and ESX Server editions of VMWare. In addition, you can also run virtual hosts created for Microsoft Virtual PC and Symantec LiveState Recovery System. All you need are these pre-created virtual machines, in the form of the virtual hard disk image and the relevant configuration files.

It's very useful for organizations that require multiple test platforms. Virtual machines cut the installation time and save on cost for buying additional hardware. Not only this, you can have pre-configured VMs and allocate them to host services on the Internet, whenever required.  So before using the VMWare Player, you need to create virtual machines that you need on your setup using one of VMWare Workstation, GSX Server, ESX Server and Microsoft Virtual PC. Once you have created the virtual machines, copy their virtual disk and configuration files on a DVD or network server, where you have plenty of space. After this you need the VMWare Player to run those stored virtual machines.

Features
Coming to its features, the VMWare Player can connect and disconnect any pre-configured devices in the VM. You can change the amount of memory allocated to the VM by clicking on the menu option Player>TroubleShoot>Change Memory Allocation. The Player also lets you to set the type of network connection for your VM in one of three modes: bridged, host-only, or NAT. In addition, the player allows you to seamlessly copy and paste objects from the virtual machine to the host and vice-versa. To use this feature, you must have the 'VMWare Tools' installed. The Player can run on 64-bit host OSs . VMWare Player ensures that VMs run safely isolated from the host machine making use of the hardware-level security and fault isolation of the virtualization solutions.

Using VMWare Player
Launch the VMWare Player from Start>Programs>VMWare. Select the configuration file of the VM that you want to run. Select the configuration file. It should be one of VMX, VMC or SV2I extension files. VMX files represent VMWare machines, VMCs are MS Virtual PC images and SV2I extension for Symantec LiveState Recovery System images. Once the configuration file gets loaded in the player, its starts the VM and you can work on it without even knowing that you are on a virtual machine. Suppose you don't have any virtual machine ready and you want to test something on Linux OS, you can the download pre-configured virtual machines image file from the VMWare website. The site has links of virtual machine images created by vendors such as IBM, Novell and MySQL.

Sanjay Majumder

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