Creating a Virtual Machine on VMware* Tutorial

	November 16, 2008 9:00 PM PST

This tutorial has been created to give the reader an easy to follow, step by step guide for creating Virtual Machines (VMs) with VMWare.   Once this tutorial has been completed, you will be able to take advantage of virtualization and create your own VMs.  Depending on your virtualization expertise, this tutorial could take from 15 minutes to 2 hours to complete.  Intel Corporation maintains a forum on virtualization which you may wish to review.  You can find it here.

1. Virtual Machine creation using VMware Server

1.1 Assumptions
This document assumes you have installed VMware Server.  The following screen shots document usage of Windows* 2003 Enterprise Edition as your host O/S.  The screens are very similar if your host O/S is LINUX.            
1.2 Starting VMware Server
When you start VMware Server, you will see:

Login to the local host by selecting the “local host” option and click OK.  This will bring up the console window with the “Home” tab selected.  It looks like:

You are now ready to create your first Virtual Machine.
1.3 Creating a Virtual Machine
Creating a Virtual Machine is added by the “New Virtual Machine” Wizard.  With the “Home” tab selected on the VMware Server Console, click the “New Virtual Machine” entry to start the wizard.  You first get:

Click “Next” to proceed.  You then get:

The “Typical” selection gives you the most commonly used devices (through VMware Server) and configuration options.  This selection is used in this tutorial.  Click “Next” to proceed to the guest O/S widow.  It looks like:

If your hardware supports 64-bit O/Ss, select it here or choose the 32-bit O/S you want to create.  If you select a 64-bit O/S on hardware which cannot support it you will get:

Select the Guest O/S and version you want:

And click “Next”.  The standard “Virtual Machine Name” comes up as:

Rename it something meaningful like EBI2SDC30-W-L-1.  This means its host machine is EBI2SDC30, its host O/S is windows, its guest O/S is LINUX and it is number 1 of this type.
Since the machine I am using for constructing this document is named “STEV-OFFICE”, I am going to name it:  STEV-OFFICE-W-L-1.  I also change the drive specification to one of the data disks ala:

And click “Next” to proceed to the “Network Type” window, which looks like:

I have always used the bridged networking.  There are security issues with using Network Address Translation (NAT) with some Virtual Machine Managers (VMMs), it is recommended against using NAT.  Click “Next” to continue to the “Disk Capacity” window, which looks like:

For benchmarks which do not use a large amount of disk space, 8 Gigabytes is sufficient.  If your benchmark requires more space, increase it to a sufficient amount.  Ensure that you choose an amount large enough, since once it is created, you cannot increase it again.  The larger the size chosen, the longer it will take to create the Virtual Machine.
1.4 Changing Amount of Memory used.
By default the virtual machine will look like:

You will have 256 Mbytes for memory and 1 virtual CPU.  To modify this, click on “Edit virtual machine settings”. You then see:

To change the amount of memory, move the slider to the desired amount.  The up and down arrow can be used to increment/decrement by 4 Mbytes.  Click “OK”
1.5 Changing the number of Virtual CPUs
Click on “Edit virtual machine settings”.  Click on the “Processors” Device and you will see: