This is the 2nd in a 4 part series outlining the installation, configuration, modification, and use of VMware Player. Part one is located here part 1 of 4. part 3 of 4 is done now too

If you think virtualization is hard, you haven’t tried appliance images yet. VMware has release a free player for virtualization images. It can be downloaded at the following site VMware Player download. If you have never installed it before, check out the previous post, step by step installation instructions.

The first piece of software you may need, besides VMware player, is a BitTorrent client. This is a downloading application, which uses a style of peer to peer file sharing to download files faster and easier. Instead of downloading the VMX and VMDK files directly from VMware, this allows you to download it from local computers (across the street, across town, across the state possibly), at much faster speeds. There are a variety of clients available, check out this site for a solid list bittorrent program list.

Once you have installed the bittorrent client, you can now visit VMware’s Application Marketplace. Visit The Application Marketplace is located here.

When you first open an VMware image zipped folder, you will generally find 2 major files, VMX and VMDK. The first, VMX, is the text configuration file. Approx 15 to 35 lines of configuration options. These files I will cover in more details in the next post, as you will need to understand how to adjust them as you create your own virtual machines. The other file(s) is the hard drive image. These files expand to meet the needs. When you create an hard drive image, it will start out as a few K and expand as you install an os. There are additional files which are generated during execution of the player, they are lck files and lock the hard drive image and configuration files. There are also nvram, vmware.log, vmem (with a random file name, 564da975-81a2-07fa-f6f5-ac52d4897757.vmem), and vmsd. You don’t have to worry about these other files yet, just double click on the VMX to load up the player.

I downloaded 3 Different Appliance Images for testing. FreeNAS, Haiku, and RedHat 6.2, all of these we extremely easy to get up and running in no time. It really it as simple as download, unzip and boot. (I did download Freedos, but was unable to get into the gui, so I left it out of this tutorial)

Let’s first look at FreeNAS, a VMware image of FreeNAS. This is a open source Linux based networked attached storage tool. I loaded it up and within a few seconds got the following prompt:

According to the websites PDF for quick installation:

· Select 1 and enter the name of your Ethernet Interface (fxp0 in my case, yours may be
different)
· Press at the Optional 1 Interface prompt, Select Y and reboot the PC.
· Once the computer has rebooted and the menu is up again, select 2 and enter your IP Address
settings (192.168.8.128 and /24 in my example).
· Once the menu is up, select 6 and ping another device on the subnet and ensure network
connectivity is OK.
(read more)

Once setup, you can now minimize the VMware player, and open a web browser. Enter in the ip address you setup in the previous step, and you have the cool web interface:

Next Image, the easiest overall. Quick simple

“Haiku is an open-source desktop operating system focusing on usability, innovation, and speed. The first release will be an improved remake of BeOS R5, but we have completely new ideas for the future. Haiku is currently under development and making steady progress towards its first release.”

I found it a fun, quick jump into BeOS. Here is a screenshot:

I didn’t do much with it, but it booted right up, let me click around and play. No long installation or rebooting to a live cd at all.

The last, and possibly most recognized image I tested was RedHat 6.2. This image is a server installation was chosen during creation of the image. I have used Red Hat a few times before, so I took advantage of testing the included apache server.

This is a screenshot of firefox, on my laptop, connected to the apache server inside of the virtual machine:

The next post in this series will explain how to build your own images. This is where the power lies. With a few quick downloads I had windows 3.1 up and running. Tune in later this week for the details. If you have any questions, please leave a comment or e-mail me directly.