Working in a Virtual World

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