VMware Virtualization Report

Virtual software (VMWARE)

A seminar report submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements
for the
Award of the degree
MASTER OF COMPUTER APPLICATIONS (2014)

CERTIFICATE OF ORIGINALITY

I, Hitesh Gupta, hereby state that the content of the following report is written,
edited and reviewed by me. This seminar report is an original effort on part of
me. However, any external data including websites’ data, book data are used by
citing proper references and authors wherever required.

Signature:
….…………………………………
Hitesh Gupta

VIRTUALIZATION SOFTWARE(VMWARE)

2

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

It feels me an immense pleasure to present this seminar report entitled
―Virtualization Software (VMWARE)‖ to ―Dr. M. Syamala Devi”, Professor at
Department of Computer Science and Applications, Panjab University,
Chandigarh. I would like to thank my professor for guiding me at regular
intervals and helping me in completion of this seminar report.

I would be remiss to fail to acknowledge our heavy debt to the VMware Official
knowledgebase, published by VMware Inc. From this series of text, I acquired
numerous ideas for how to create exercises that would give my fellow students
repeated exposure to new and emerging technologies and adapt to them.

I am grateful to have had access to the ideas contained in these outstanding
textbooks like Mastering VMware by Scott Lowe!

Finally, much of my understanding of the vocabulary terms introduced in this
report was obtained from vSphere video lectures provided by Lynda.com.


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Contents
Sr.

Title

Page

1

Certificate of Originality
Acknowledgement
Foreword
Getting started with virtualization

2
3
6
7

1.1
1.2

..Introduction to virtualization
..Types of Virtualization

7
8-17

……Server Virtualization
……Desktop Virtualization
……Storage Virtualization
……Operating System Virtualization
……Network Virtualization
……Hardware Virtualization
……Para Virtualization

1.4
1.5

..Virtualization Applications
..Virtualization Terminology

18-21
21

……Host Machine
……Virtual Machine
……Virtual Disk
……Virtual Network
……Snapshot

1.6

..Future of Virtualization

22-23

2

VMware

24-44

2.1
2.2

..Introduction
..Free Products

24
25

……VMware Player
……VMware Server
……VMware Workstation
……VMware Academic Alliance

2.3

..Implementing VMware Server

26-44

……Pros and Cons
…… Getting Your (Free) Copy of VMware Server
…… Installing VMware Server
…… Creating a Guest Virtual Machine
…… Starting the VMware Server Console
…… Installing a new virtual machine
…… Installing an Operating System
…… Skipping the OS Installation Process
…… Skipping the Application Installation Process

3

VMware Workstation

45-61

3.1
3.2
3.3
3.4

..Introduction
..Benefits to college/ universities
..System requirements
..Files created by Workstation

46
46-47
47


4

3.5

47-48

……Bridged
……NAT
……Host-only
……None

3.6
3.7

..Networking Modes

13

..Installation of VMware Workstation
..Creating a new VM

48
48

……Selecting guest OS
……Provide Easy Install information
…… Specifying the Virtual Machine Name and File Location
…… Specifying Disk Capacity for a Virtual Machine
…… Customizing Virtual Machine Hardware

3.8
3.9
3.10
3.11

..Create a Typical Virtual Machine
.. Installing and Upgrading VMware Tools
.. Installing New Software in a Virtual Machine
..Using Virtual Machines

51
52
52
53-61

…… Start a Virtual Machine
…… Shut Down a Virtual Machine
…… Pause and Unpause a Virtual Machine
…… Suspend and Resume a Virtual Machine
…… Using the Drag-and-Drop Feature
…… Using the Copy and Paste Feature
…… Add a Host Printer to a Virtual Machine
…… Use a Removable Device in a Virtual Machine
…… Changing the Virtual Machine Display
…… Report Battery Information in the Guest
…… Use Exclusive Mode
…… Use Unity Mode
…… Taking Snapshots of Virtual Machines
…… Closing Virtual Machines and Exiting Workstation

4
5

Case Study: DBaaS setup for Oxford University, U.K.
Cloud Computing and Virtualization

62-64
65-68

5.1
5.2

.. The Difference between Virtualization and Cloud Computing
.. The intersection of virtualization and cloud

66
68

6

References

69


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Foreword
Although virtualization is all the rage in the tech industry press, and savvy market watchers
have observed the exciting IPO of VMware, and Citrix’s acquisition of company, XenSource,
the market for virtualization software is largely unaddressed. Depending on whose research
you read, only 7 percent or so of x86 servers are virtualized, and only a tiny fraction of
desktop or mobile PCs are virtualized. But the virtualization market is white hot, and every
day new announcements in storage, server, and network virtualization make the picture more
complex and harder to understand.
This report provides the perfect way to develop a complete understanding of both the
technology and the benefits of virtualization. Arguably, virtualization is simply a consequence
of Moore’s Law –– the guideline developed by Intel founder Gordon Moore that predicts a
doubling in the number of transistors per unit area on a CPU every couple of years. With PCs
and servers becoming so incredibly powerful, the typical software suites that most users would
install on a single physical server a few years ago now consume only a few percent of the
resources of a modern machine. Virtualization is simply a consequence of the obvious waste
of resources –– allowing a machine to run multiple virtualized servers or client operating
systems simultaneously. But if that were all that were needed, there wouldn’t be such a fuss
about virtualization. Instead, virtualization is having a profound impact on data center
architectures and growth, on software lifecycle management, on security and manageability of
software, and the agility of IT departments to meet with new challenges. And it is these
opportunities and challenges that urgently need to be articulated to technologists and business
leaders alike in an accessible and understandable way.
Having spent many enjoyable hours with my guide, a recognized AI guru, I cannot think of a
better-qualified author for a report whose objective is to cut through the hype and clearly and
succinctly deal with virtualization and its effects on IT and users alike.
This, together with author’s incisive, clear, and articulate style, makes this report a pleasure to
read and a terrific contribution to the virtualization industry –– a concise categorization
ofvirtualization that will further the understanding of the technology and itsbenefits, driving
uptake of virtualization generally. It is with great pleasurethat I strongly recommend that you
read this book.
Hitesh Gupta
Masters in Computer Applications.


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1 GETTING STARTED
1.1 VIRTUALIZATION
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, in the context of computing, virtual means
―notphysically existing as such but made by software to appear to do so.‖
Virtualization essentially means to create multiple, logical instances of software or
hardware on a single physical hardware resource. This technique simulates the available
hardware and gives every application running on top of it, the feel that it is the unique holder
of the resource[4].
Virtualization is a technique for using computing resources and devices in a completely
functional manner regardless of their physical layout or location. This includes splitting a
single physical computer into multiple "virtual" servers, making it appear as though each
virtual machine is running on its own dedicated hardware and allowing each to be rebooted
independently. In storage virtualization, on the other hand, the server regards multiple physical
devices as a single logical unit.

Virtualization is nothing but creating a virtual environment for any program to run on an
existing platform as a guest, without interfering or interrupting with the host platform’s
services or programs. The virtual environment running might be an Operating System, Storage
device, Network or an Application server among other things.
It would be easier to understand the concept with more details like it types and uses. Below are
some Types of Virtualization:


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1.2 TYPES OF VIRTUALIZATION:
1. Server Virtualization: Most businesses often use a combination of a number of
application servers, web servers, image servers, document servers, audio and video
servers, database servers, print servers etc. Servers vary in terms of their user activity
and other factors. The servers which aren’t used to their full capacity, asignificant
amount of money, energy and resources is still to be spent by companies to maximize
their uptime, keeping them updated and preventing them from crashes and overheating.
A single physical server can become multiple virtual machine (VM). These VM’s
reside on energy efficient servers which then, imitates to be multiple servers on the
network. Users can interact with virtual servers as if they were still physical servers.
Companies would now need to maintain, power and cool a very fewer servers.These
facilities have been assaulted with virtual servers, virtual networks, virtual storage,
virtual appliances, and other ―V-technologies‖. These technologies are designed to
provide the following benefits for data center environments:






Cost reduction and higher asset utilization
Greater stability and higher availability
Simplification of operational processes
Greater fault tolerance and flexibility
Portability in terms of server types and OS.

2. Desktop Virtualization:These are similar to server virtualizations. Having multiple
desktops individually can waste energy, time and resources to maintain as well as
increase the risk of data loss or theft. We can virtualize desktops into energy efficient
data centers. The desktops now become thin clients and sensitive data is not stored
on them. This gives users the following benefits:
 No PC maintenance.
 No individual software updates.
 No hard drive crashes
 Less costs
 Uses less energy
 Centralized IT management
 Easy update service packs, OS patches.
 Easily restore servers/desktops in case of natural disaster.

3. Storage Virtualization:Storage systems are complex, and may be thought of as a special
purpose computer designed to provide storage capacity along with advanced data protection
features[W3]. In this type, the actual storage space that use to be offered by your SAN
(Storage Area Network) or NAS (Network Attached Storage) is virtualized. Virtualizing storage
space means you also are virtualizing your Virtual Machine disk files as well. This becomes
extremely useful for Business Continuity Planning and Disaster Recovery due to following
benefits it entails:




Easily replicate your storage across over to another location or even a different
geographical regions.
Fault tolerant clusters for their storage. Eg. SnapMirror form NetApp


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Types of Storage Virtualization [5]:




Block virtualization used in this context refers to the abstraction of logical storage from
physical storage so that it may be accessed without regard to physical storage or
heterogeneous structure. This separation allows the administrators of the storage system
greater flexibility in how they manage storage for end users.
File virtualization addresses the NAS challenges by eliminating the dependencies
between the data accessed at the file level and the location where the files are physically
stored. This provides opportunities to optimize storage use and server consolidation and
to perform non-disruptive file migrations.

4. Operating System Virtualization
Operating System Virtualization is a type of Virtualization concept that most users today are familiar
with. It typically allows you to run and install any kind of Operating system like Windows 7 or a Linux
distro on your existing operating system. It requires a Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) which allows
you to install and manage multiple operating systems running simultaneously even (If your machine
has powerful resources).
The operating systems run virtually of course without the any knowledge that it is installed on an
existing platform or that there is another virtual operating system running alongside (If you choose to
install multiple operating systems on your VMM). VMwareis probably the one of the most used
Virtual Machine Manager’s today.
In the IT industry, this serves as a huge benefit. It allows them to run their server on the virtual
environment, which results in saving the costs of extra machine, hardware components, space,
location fees, power management, etc.
The benefit of operating system virtualization is its efficiency. Rather than running a number of
complete guest OSes so that applications can each have access to dedicated operating resources,
operating system virtualization uses a set of libraries to provide operating system functionality and
file mapping services; consequently, much less software is required to enable the applications to be
isolated. Therefore, operating system virtualization is quite efficient, enabling high performance for
the overall system. Put another way, operating system virtualization imposes little overhead for the
virtualization capability achieved, thereby ensuring most of the machine’s resources are available to
the applications running in the containers. This has the effect of allowing more containers to run on a
given piece of hardware than would be possible with the more heavyweight hardware emulation
virtualization approach.
Operating system virtualization is well suited when an organization requires large numbers of
homogeneous operating environments. It’s not such a good choice when different environments are
required due to application requirements or operating system differences in version or patch level.
Operating system virtualization can be obtained from Sun, which provides it as part of its Solaris
operating system. A commercial provider of OS virtualization is SWsoft, whose Virtuozzo product is
available for both Linux and Windows.
OS virtualization works best in data centers where IT can control the components in the software
stack. For example, OS virtualization is a good choice for Web hosting. Companies that provide Web
hosting can use OS virtualization to give each hosted Web site the illusion that it has a complete
machine dedicated to its use, even though in reality it might be one of a couple of dozen Web sites,
all of which are hosted on that single machine.

9

5. Network Virtualization
Chances are that many enterprises; although having deployed and used this form of
virtualization are unaware that they are indeed using it, they don’t refer to it as virtualization,
that’s all. It may not be used at end user level but the even small enterprises deploy it. In its
very basic form, a VLAN created even on a small network can be termed as Network
Virtualization. In Network Virtualization, Two (or more) virtual networks can be created
within the same physical network belonging to the same IP range and yet they do not have
the authorization to communicate with each other. They operate in their own logical network,
with each logical network having different set of processes and functions to perform. They are
segregated within the same physical network.


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6. Hardware Virtualization
An individual independent segment of hardware may consist of smaller pieces of hardware
from multiple locations but are treated as an single independent device. The process requesting
the hardware is totally unaware and usually only alerts in case if the hardware requirements
for the process isn’t met.
In other instance, if any process is pre-allocated say about 30 percent of CPU resources, 30
percent of CPU will be set aside and allocated to only that process. The process isn’t allowed
more than 30 percent of CPU resources, and if it comes to that, the processes are queued up
and run on FIFO (First In First Out) basis.
One major downside of so-called x86 chips (see the intro to this section) is that that they don’t
provide any convenient way for multiple operating systems to share the resources of the
computer. So if you want to run multipleoperating systems (in contrast to running
virtualization within a single copyof an operating system, discussed in the previous section),
you need toimplement a method whereby every time a virtualized operating systemattempts to
call upon system resources, you intercept the call and redirect itin such a way that the
virtualization software can manage multiple instancesof operating systems.
This interception and redirection of operating system calls requires cleversoftware because it
operates at a very low level — at the interface betweenthe OS and the physical hardware. Not
only does the software need to reliably catch (called trap) these calls, it must also do it very
fast; otherwise, theperformance hit of running virtualization would outweigh the benefits of
hardware multiplexing. This specialized virtualization software even has its own name:
hypervisor. (The term hypervisoris a bit of a play on words. Anoperating system is sometimes
referred to as a supervisor, so the virtualization software acts as a supervisor of the supervisors
and is therefore dubbeda hypervisor. This is what passes for humor in the computer science
world.)
The best-established method of virtualizing access to system resources iscalled hardware
emulation. In this method, the hypervisor creates a virtualmachine by emulating an entire
hardware environment. The operating systemthat’s loaded into a virtual machine is a standard,
unmodified product. As itmakes calls for system resources, the hardware emulation software
catchesthe system call and redirects it to manipulate data structures provided by the
hypervisor. The hypervisor itself makes calls to the actual physical hardware underlying all the
software.
Hardware emulation addresses that problem by cleverly substituting piecesof code within the
operating system at runtime in a process called binarytranslation.What that means is that when
the guest operating system is running (thus the use of the term runtime), the hardware
emulation hypervisorgoes in and changes part of the operating system. Because the operating
system is an executable program, it’s in a format of 1s and 0s (zeroes), which are required to
interact with computer hardware, also known as a binary(thus the phrase binary translation).
The hypervisor translates the nativebinary format of the OS to the binary format of the
hypervisor in the areas of the OS that makes calls to hardware resources. And, by the way,
hardwareemulation can support both Windows and Linux guests.

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Binary translation occurs in parts of the operating system that interact withthe four key
resources of the hardware: processor, memory, network, andstorage. The hypervisor replaces
key sections of operating system code,such as network device drivers, with code that talks to
the emulated hardware layer(essentially, a virtualized motherboard, containing virtual
representations of a processor, memory, and so on), which is implemented in thehypervisor.
The hypervisor then arranges to forward the calls from the emulated hardware to the actual
physical hardware on the server.
As you might imagine, this is complex stuff. However, it does allow you to run unmodified
operating systems (unmodifiedby you, that is; remember, the hardware emulation
virtualization softwaremodifies the operating system at runtime to enable it to cooperate with
thehypervisor).
This approach has several strengths. Running unmodified operating systems simplifies your
job — all you have to do is load operating systems into virtualmachines. Furthermore, it lets
you run unmodified applications within theguest operating systems, enabling you to use
applications certified to runonly on certain versions of operating systems: Because you don’t
modify the OS, your application should continue to be supported by its vendor.
Furthermore, the hypervisor’s provider takes care of coordinating access to the physical
hardwareresources, making it easy to use virtualization.
You can take a couple of different approaches to hardware emulation virtualization. One is
that the hypervisor is installed on top of an existing operatingsystem that resides on the
physical server. In this approach, the hypervisoressentially acts as a user application that
knows how to coordinate calls intothe underlying existing operating system so that the
hypervisor can coordinate access to the host operating system for a number of guest
virtualmachines. You might suspect that all the coordinating might take a lot ofprocessor
cycles and would therefore reduce overall system performance.
Another approach to hardware emulation is to install the hypervisor directlyon the server
without an intervening already-installed operating system.
Because this approach installs directly on the server, it is often called bare-metal
virtualization, to symbolize the fact that no software sits between thehypervisor and the
―metal‖ of the server. In this approach to hardware emulation, the hypervisor intercepts system
calls from the guest virtual machines and coordinates access to the underlying hardware
directly. As you mightalso suspect, this approach provides much higher performance than the
version of hardware emulation described in the previous paragraph.
Hardware emulation is the type of virtualization implemented by VMware, the category leader
in x86 virtualization. (Microsoft’s Virtual Server also implements hardware emulation.)
VMware provides products that implement both approaches to hardwareemulation. VMware’s
VMware Server is installed atop an existing operatingsystem (which can be Windows or one
of several flavors of Linux), whereasits ESX Server implements bare-metal hardware
emulation. Although VMwareServer’s approach to hardware emulation — the Install-it-ontop-of-the-OSpath — imposes a significant performance hit, it can be usefully appliedwhere
performance isn’t critical. For example, lightly loaded servers can usefully apply this approach

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to hardware emulation. It’s also useful for virtualizing client machines like a desktop or
notebook PC.
Hardware emulation does have some drawbacks:
It imposes a performance penalty, even for the bare-metal approach. This problem
occurs because translation is still going on, eating up some machine cycles as the
hypervisor executes the translation.VMware does clever optimizations on this
translation, caching data thatis repeatedly accessed, and so on, but some performance
penalty stillexists. On the other hand, if you’re moving from a Pentium III–basedserver
that’s running at only 15 percent utilization to a virtualized dualcore machine that
offers 100 times the performance of the old machineand can thereby support six virtual
machines, you might not be too worried that you’re not getting 100 percent of the
potential performance ofthe new server. You’d be happy just taking advantage of
what’s availablefrom the new machine.
The idealized image of the hardware provided offers idealized device drivers.The
hypervisor contains real device drivers that talk to theunderlying hardware. In other
words, the hypervisor drives the underlying hardware, and as an end user, you must
depend on the hypervisor toinclude the appropriate drivers for your hardware.
Consequently, you’resomewhat limited in your choice of hardware because you need
thehypervisor to include drivers to interact with your hardware. AlthoughVMware
does a very good job of trying to keep up with new hardwarereleases and their
accompanying device drivers, you might find yourhardware is unsupported. So
checking the hardware compatibility list for ESX Server support is critical if you go
down this path. Note thatVMware Server, while imposing a performance penalty,
actually suffersless from the device driver issue because it is able to leverage the
devicedrivers present in the underlying OS.

7.Paravirtualization:Paravirtualizationis the name for another approach to server
virtualization.In this approach, rather than emulate a complete hardware environment,
thevirtualization software is a thin layer that multiplexes(that is, coordinates)access by guest
operating systems to the underlying physical machineresources; in other words,
paravirtualization doesn’t create an entire virtual machine to host the guest OS, but rather
enables the guest OS to interact directly with the hypervisor.
Paravirtualization is an alternative approach to virtualization. Instead ofattempting to emulate
the x86 hardware environment in software, a paravirtualization hypervisor coordinates (or
multiplexes) access to the underlyinghardware resources of the server. The best-known
example of paravirtualization is the open source product called Xen. Microsoft Server
virtualization tobe released in the future also uses the paravirtualization approach.This raises
the question of how paravirtualization actually manages the coordination to the underlying
hardware, because the guest operating systemscontain code that expects to be able to interact
directly with the hardware.
Visualize, if you will, a hypervisor residing on the hardware, meaning thatparavirtualization is
a bare-metal virtualization architecture. Insteadof the virtual machine approach of hardware
emulation, paravirtualizationinstalls a guest OS — called DomainU in Xen parlance and child
partitioning Microsoft parlance — directly on the hypervisor. Paravirtualization also adds

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a wrinkle in that the hypervisor does not contain device drivers for networkand storage
resources; instead it has a privileged guest,called Domain0 in Xenparlance and the root
partition in Microsoft parlance. Domain0 runs as aguest but has privileges that allow it to
directly access resources on the underlying hardware, whereas regular guest OSes access those
resourcesthrough Domain0. It’s something like a bucket brigade: The guest OS sends
amessage to Domain0 to request access to a hardware resource. Domain0 accesses the
hardware resource on behalf of the guest OS. When data returnsto the hardware, Domain0
reads the information and then passes it back tothe guest OS.Domain0 is a standard operating
system (like Red Hat Enterprise Linux) thathas been modified to coordinate with the
hypervisor to control access tohardware resources. In practice, from a user’s perspective, the
privileged
guest looks just like a vanilla-version operating system; the required modifications reside in
the kernel, far below what a user experiences while interacting with the OS.Rather than
modify the guest operating system at runtime via binary translation, paravirtualization requires
that guest operating systems be modifiedprior to execution to include code that can interact
with the paravirtualization hypervisor. After modification, when a guest operating system
accessesthe processor or memory, the modified code interacts with the hypervisor,
which then coordinates access to those resources. It also handles access to storage and network
resources differently than hardware emulation virtualization.
Whereas hardware emulationvirtualization includes device drivers directly in the hypervisor,
paravirtualization uses the native device drivers included in Domain0. Other guest operating
systems have special stub drivers(called back-end drivers) thatcommunicate with stub drivers
in the privileged guest (called front-end drivers). A stub driver is one that allows the guest
operating system to make acall to what looks like a regular device driver, but instead of
making a hardware call, the stub driver communicates with its counterpart in Domain0.(Why
the funny name? Because it removes all the code necessary to talk to a device driver, it’s been
effectively whittled down in size — a stub, in otherwords.)After the privileged guest receives
data from the guest OS’s stub driver, itthen forwards the data on to the real device driver on
behalf of the guest OS.

So, for example, a guest OS call to send data through the network would gothrough its stub
network driver to the privileged guest, which would receivethe network request in its stub
driver and then pass the data on to its physical network card via a device driver.
Communication between the two stubdrivers is extremely fast because it makes use of a
system resource calledshared memory— essentially memory that can be accessed by more
thanone software process. Because the memory is written by one process andread by a second
with no need to copy the data in the memory, sharedmemory can offer extremely fast data
throughput.A major benefit of this approach to device access is that the hypervisor
doesn’tneed to contain any device drivers. It merely uses the shared memory communication
to give the data to the privileged guest (remember, the privilegedguest is a regular operating
system that contains a whole set of device drivers for the underlying hardware), which can
reuse the native device driversfor access to hardware resources. This means that end users
don’t dependon the virtualization software provider to support the hardware they own;
instead, the privileged guest, which contains the drivers necessary to workwith the hardware,
provides hardware support. So, for example, if the Domain0is Red Hat Enterprise Linux, then
during installation, part of the processensures all necessary device drivers are present. When a
guest OS needs toaccess storage or the network, the hypervisor uses those drivers. This avoids

14

a problem alluded to in the hardware emulation discussion earlier, where endusers can find
that their virtualization software doesn’t support their hardware.
A second benefit of this approach to virtualization is that it offers very goodperformance
because there is less runtime translation of operating systemcalls as in hardware emulation. I
have heard Xen users state that they experience no more than a 2 to 3 percent performance hit
running applications invirtualized operating systems compared to running the same
applications innonvirtualized operating systems.
However, paravirtualization has a major drawback: the requirement to modifyguest operating
systems prior to execution to include code to interact withthe hypervisor. The guest operating
system cannot be installed as-is; rather,you have to modify the OS kernel prior to installation.
Modifying a kernel toenable it to be virtualized is no picnic — something I can attest to from
personal experience. Moreover, modifying the kernel requires access to thesource code.
Although this modification is possible for open source operating systems like Linux or
OpenSolaris, it isn’t possible for proprietary operating systems, particularly Windows. So Xen
users have been stuck being ableto virtualize Linux operating systems, but not Windows. As
you can imagine,this isn’t a desirable situation. This state of affairs has essentially limited
paravirtualization’s uptake to technically savvy Linux users — admittedly arather small subset
of the computing universe.Operating system vendors have instituted the following changes to
mitigatethis unappealing situation:
Some Linux distributions have been modified to include both regular andparavirtualized
hardware interfaces in their kernels so that they’re capable at runtime of discerning which type
of environment they’re executing in and using the correct interface for the environment. This
solutionmeans you wouldn’t need to hand-modify the kernel on that particular
distribution to get it to run on the paravirtualized hypervisor.
Some Linux distributions have been modified to serve as Dom0 privileged guests. This change
means that no kernel modification is necessary to enable them to communicate with the
hypervisor via back-endstub drivers and coordinate access from the stub drivers to the
nativedrivers Dom0 already contains. Both Red Hat and Novell have included
this capability in their most recent releases.
The new generation of chips that has been released by both AMD andIntel provides
virtualization support in hardware. The effect of this chipupgrade is that Xen can support nonparavirtualized operating systems,thereby removing one of the most significant barriers to
adoption, particularly with respect to supporting Windows guests. For more information on
this new generation of chips and further hardware advances,Paravirtualization may be
obtained from any operating system that providesit as part of the native OS. Xen is included in
most popular Linux distributions, XenSource (the commercial sponsor of Xen) sells an
enhanced versionof Xen as a commercial product called XenEnterprise, and Microsoft will


15

includeparavirtualization

in

its

next

Microsoft

Server

release.

The following table provides the summary of virtualization technologies.


16


17

1.4 Virtualization Applications:
To keep this document brief, see the summary table below:


18


19


20

[3]
1.5Virtualization Terminology:
1. Host machine or host computer- The computer on which the virtual machine
software is installed (Virtual PC or VMware etc.). It is physical machine.
2. Virtual machine (VM) or Guest OS- The operating system that runs in virtual machine
software on the host computer. Comprised primarily of a configuration file and one or
more virtual hard drive files. It is logical in nature.
3. Virtual disk- One or more files that reside on the host computer that make up the
VM’s hard disk.
4. Virtual network-The network configuration used by the VM. There are various
options available: bridged, host only, NAT and none. VMs behave like just another
computer on the network.
5. Snapshot-A partial copy of a VM at a particular moment in time. Allows you to ‘go
back’ to the VM at that particular state. Some programs allow saving multiple
snapshots.


21

1.6 Future of Virtualization:

Virtualization Gets Integrated into Operating Systems:

The inclusion of virtualization in operating systems reflects the OS prrecognition that
virtualization is so critical a technology that it needs to be a fundamental part of the operating
system. Of course, you might take a morcynical view: The OS vendors recognize that the
virtualization market is tooimportant to cede to competitors like VMware. More importantly,
OS vendors don’t want to lose their primary role in the data center. If end users focus their
attention on how well their applications integrate with software than the underlying OS, that
means OS vendors no longer are the key supplierto those end users. This is bad from their
perspective.

So, you can expect to see increasing virtualization integration from OS providers in their
flagship products. In the future, look for this integration to be extended even further into areas
like virtualization management, storage, and server pooling.
Of course, such integration will present a challenge to independent vendors of virtualization
products, particularly the leading vendor, VMware. Currently, it has significantly better
functionality compared with the virtualization functionality present in operating systems, but
that advantage will undoubtedly be reduced as OS vendors improve their products.
Virtualized Software: Delivered to Your Door Preinstalled:
Many software vendors find that the vast majority of their support calls are related to initial
installation and configuration. If they could find a way to reduce the difficulty of initial
installation and configuration, they could reduce the total amount they have to spend on
support as well as focus their support resources on solving more critical issues.
One initiative that many vendors have pursued to reduce installation complexity is to deliver
the software preinstalled on a piece of hardware. These bundles of software and hardware are
called appliances,and they can be a powerful way of delivering functionality to users. If
you’ve ever installed a home wireless router, you’ve experienced how easy appliances can
make bringing up a new software application; most consumer wireless routers are nothing
more than a preconfigured Linux system installed in an inexpensive piece of hardware.
Hardware appliances — those special-purpose pieces of hardware that are delivered with both
an operating system and application preinstalled and preconfigured, ready to operate — are
much easier to install when compared to the four-step process outlined earlier. Typically, you
install the hardware in a server rack, power it up, and give it network connectivity. You don’t
need to do any further work to get the software installed and configured. You take a Web
browser interface (typically sporting an easy-to-use wizard) for a spin to configure the
necessary network and user account information. That’s it. The appliance is installed and
ready to use.


22

Virtualization Diffusing into the Internet:
One particularly neat use of virtualization, especially the operating system flavor of
virtualization often referred to as containers, involves harnessing virtualization’s many talents
to create more efficient Web-hosting applications. Software as a Service (widely referred to as
SaaS) is the next frontier of Web-based services that will take advantage of virtualization.
SaaS is the delivery of computing services over the Internet. Google’s Web searching is a
form of SaaS. Google’s search makes it available via a Web page; you fill in the box with your
desired search term, and Google’s enormous server farm remotely executes your search and
returns the results in a set of web pages.
The Changing Skill Set of IT Personnel:
Managing the IT infrastructure from a higher-level perspective will require new skills in areas
such as capacity planning and monitoring. For many system administrators, this situation will
require a skill upgrade and a shift in perspective from tactical to strategic. It’s not too early to
begin assessing your current duties and skills to see where you’re likely to need to develop
new capabilities. Consider how you can begin to learn these new skills and seek out
developmental opportunities. But whatever you do, recognize that the traditional way of
running IT infrastructures will undergo a rapid transformation.
Some IT personnel may resist the shifting nature of their responsibilities. You can minimize
this resistance by pointing out that changing skill sets is the nature of IT because it evolves so
rapidly. Emphasize the opportunity to learn new skills as a way of keeping current on the
mainstream trends in IT.


23

2VMWARE

2.1 Introduction
VMware was the first serious virtualization software developed by VMWAREInc, U.S.A. It was
developed in mid 1990’s.It is leader in server and desktop virtualization.
Market share:
•

VMware has 80.1% market share

•

Microsoft has 15.1% market share

•

Citrix XenServer has 4.1% market share
[Source: https://www.VMware.com]


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2.2 Free products by VMWARE:
1. VMware Player – It is the end-user software provided by VMWARE. It runs existing
virtual machines but cannot create a new VM. It has many other limitations like
inability to stretch virtual machines, limited OS support etc.
2. VMware Server – It is used in small business environments. It can create and run VMs
and is better suited for low-end server applications. It provides similar options as
workstation while implementation. Hence, it is not discussed in detail here.
3. VMware Workstation- It is the flagship product of VMware. It allows users to create
and run virtual machines as well as to import VMs including the capability of
virtualizing a physical machine. It has all the premium feature available like ability to
create unlimited snapshots, creating movie tutorials etc. VMware Workstation 10®
costs around $60(approx.) for new version and $50(approx.) for upgrade version from
Workstation 7 and above. In this text, I will be discussing Workstation in detail.
4. VMware Academic Alliance-It is a free online program through with educational
institutions can get unlimited licenses for classroom use. It is currently available in US
only.


25

2.3 Implementing VMware Server:

Understanding VMware ServerArchitecture: Pros and Cons
VMware Server installs on top of an existing operating system, and virtual machines are then
installed on VMware Server — meaning it isn’t one of those bare-metal virtualization
products that you install directly on the server, with no intervening operating system
whatsoever. Put another way, the VMware Server architecture means that the virtualization
software resides in a layer between the host operating system and one or more guest operating
systems.
This approach has pros and cons.
First, the cons:
 The additional layer affects performance. The machine’s own operating system sits
between the hardware and the virtualization software; that means there’s an additional
layer of software between individual virtual machines and the underlying hardware.
The result is that a portion of the machine’s capability isn’t available to your VMware
Server because it’s devoted to running the underlying operating system.


The virtualization software contends for hardware resources with other
applications on the host system. The virtualization software has less control over
scheduling hardware resources because the underlying operating system controls the
overall hardware scheduling, allocating the hardware resources among VMware Server
as well as any other applications the underlying operating system is running. In other
words, VMware Server is treated like an application, and it gets only a portionof the
overall hardware resources.



It doesn’t provide as much functionality as its bare-metal brother.VMware’s ESX
Server is the company’s flagship product, and as such it provides lots of ways to tweak
the virtualization software’s configuration and to track the performance of individual
virtual machines. It also provides the ability to do virtual machine failover and other
higher-level functions.
VMware Server is focused on providing basic virtualization functionality on individual
machines and therefore doesn’t do as much as ESX Server.
Now, the pros:


You don’t need to configure hardware.Because VMware Server installson top of the
existing operating system, you don’t really have to worryabout configuring the
hardware to work with the virtualization software,which is a big plus.



You can use existing hardware. ESX Server supports only certain hardwareproducts,
which might very well mean you need to purchase new hardware to run it. VMware
Server imposes no hardware requirements, which means you can use just about any
machine as a VMware Server host.


26



For typical VMware Server users, the performance hit is irrelevant. Although you
take a small performance hit from the extra layer of software, if you don’t really need
high levels of performance from the system, that’s not much of a sacrifice.



You get flexibility in your choice of host operating system. VMware makes versions
of VMware server available to run on either Windows or Linux, so you have a lot of
flexibility when it comes to which virtualization path you take.



Multisystem configurations are welcome here. VMware Server is ideal for situations
in which you need a multisystem configuration — several different virtual machines on
a single server. Imagine, if you will, that you need to run a Linux machine running a
CRM application, a Windows machine that contains the database the CRM system
uses, and a second Windows machine running a Web server to provide access to the
CRM system — and you’re willing to do all that without getting too worried about
performance issues. If that’s what you want, then VMware Server is a great choice,
because it offers a great foundation for exercising lowload, multisystem configurations.
For that reason, the product is often used by software engineers for development and
quality assurance purposes because they can easily create complex environments for
testing purposes but typically don’t put much load on the systems.



Free: Did I mention the product is free? That makes up for a major advantage to us,
testers.

Getting Your (Free) Copyof VMware Server
VMware has done a great job making it easy to install VMware Server. Theproduct runs on both
Windows and Linux operating systems, but for the sakeof this discussion, I show you how to install it
on a Windows machine.

Acquiring VMware Server
1. Point your browser to www.VMware.com/download/server, theDownload
VMwareserver page on VMware’s Web site.
2. Click the Register for Your Free Serial Number(s) link.Doing so takes you to a
registration page where you’ll fill out informationabout yourself and your
environment.
3. Answer the questions and click Submit.This step takes you to the aptly named
Download VMware Server – YourRegistration Has Been Received page that displays your
serial number(s).
4. Print this page.This is your only record of your serial number, and you’ll need it later in
the install process.If you don’t have access to a printer, you should write this information
down and keep it handy.
5. Back on the Download VMware Server – Your Registration Has BeenReceived page, find
the Download Now button and click it.An End User License Agreement (EULA) page
appears, with Yes and Nobuttons.This is a legally binding agreement, so you should read it in
its entirety.
6. Click the Yes button.You’re presented with a page with a number of download options.

27

7. Click the very first option — the VMware Server for Windows OperatingSystems option —
which lets you download a self-extracting, installationexecutable
file for Windows.Your browser should either download it automatically to your default
download location or ask you where you want to download the file. That’sit. Now you have
the install file for VMware Server on your machine aswell as a printed record of your VMware
Server serial number(s).

Installing VMware Server
This section leads you through the process of installing VMware Server itself.
1. Double click the .exe file you downloaded to your machine in thepreceding step list.The
VMware Server installer begins the installation process. You see a welcoming splash
screeninviting you to begin installation.

2. Click Next to continue.
You see another EULA acceptance screen. (You already saw one whenyou were downloading
the .exe file.) You might think that a secondEULA is redundant, and you’d be right. However,
you can’t continue theinstallation without accepting it.
3. Nod politely to the EULA and click the Accept button.
The installation wizard asks whether you want a complete installation ora custom one. If this
is your first exposure to VMware Server, I recommend you avoid trying to do any kind of
custom installation.
4. Leave the default Complete radio button selected and click Next.

28

VMware Server depends on a Web server running on the host toenable VMware Management
Interface (VMI) access to the virtualizationsoftware. If you don’t have Internet Information
Services (IIS) installed onyour Windows host operating system already, you get a message
complaining about the fact that either IIS is not installed or itis misconfigured. Should you
choose to, you can always come back andinstall the VMI at a later time once IIS has been
installed and properly configured.Having IIS and VMI installed arenot necessaryfor
VMwareServerto operate properly, so you can safely ignore the message.

5. Now you get to choose where to install VMware Server. I recommendyou accept the
default, as depicted, and then click Next.A dialog box appears, noting that you have
Autorun enabled for CDs —if you have it enabled, of course. If you do see this dialog
box, I recommendyou disable it. The reasonis that the host system and all
virtualmachineswill reactto a CD being insertedinto themachine if Autorun
isenabled,which will drive you (and the machines) nuts. Better to configure thesystem
not to Autorun.
Because you need to deal with CDs to install guest virtual machines, leavethe default
Yes, Disable Autorun check box selected, and click Next.You’ve now finished the
configuration necessary to begin actual installation.You get a dialog box asking
whether you’re ready to begin.


29


30

7. Click the Install button, and you’re on your way.During the installation, you’ll see an
Installing VMware ServerComponents dialog box, along with a progress bar that very
nicelyshows you how the installation is coming along.You then see a dialog box indicating
successful installation of VMware
Server, as shown.
8. Click Finish.
That’s it! You have VMware Server available to run now.

Creating a Guest Virtual Machine
Well, you have VMware Server up and running, but . . . the whole point of
runningvirtualization
is to support guest operating systems. That’s the task you turn to next. You’ll be impressed
with how straightforwarddoing this with VMwareServeris.
Starting the VMware Server Console
Everything you do with VMware Server is controlled through the VMwareServer Console.
Think of it as the main administration mechanism to work withVMware Server and any guest
Virtual Machine (VM) systems you’ve installed.Getting the VMware Server Console up and
running is a piece of cake.
1. Choose Start➪
Programs➪
VMware➪
VMwareServer➪
VMware ServerConsole.
The first thing you see on the screen is a dialog box asking whether youwant to connect to a
local or a remote host.

31

2. Because your VMware Server is running on this machine, leave thedefault choice
(local) selected and click OK.
You’re presented with the actual VMware Server Console. This indicates that VMware Server
is running and availableon the local machine; the VMware Server Console is ready for you to
decide what you want to do with VMware Server.


32

Installing a new virtual machine
Your first order of business here is to install a virtual machine. To do that:
1. With the VMware Server Console open, click the New Virtual Machine icon.
This starts the New Virtual Machine Wizard, as shown.

2. Click Next to kick off the process.
The next dialog box offers you the choice between a Typical or a Customconfiguration.


33

3. For now, stick with the easiest navigation option; leave the Typicaloption selected and
then click Next.
The Select a Guest Operating System page of the wizard appears.I’ve decided for the sake of
this example to install Fedora Core 6, so thenext steps deal with that scenario. (If you’re
feeling adventurous, youcan install another OS, but you’d be on your own!)
4. In the Select a Guest Operating System page, select the Linux option,select Other
Linux 2.6.x Kernel from the Version drop-down list, andthen click Next.
You’re invited to give the new virtual machine a name and a storagelocation in the next dialog
box. You need to select the Other Linux 2.6.x Kernel option because Fedoraisn’t one of the
default configurations included with VMware Server.


34

5. Go ahead and cleverly name the new VM Fedora 1. Leave the Location text box set to
its default and click Next.
The next dialog box gives you a number of networking options for yournew virtual machine.
Each of the options uses the networking capabilitiesof VMware Server itself to operate
slightly differently. Your choices are:
• Use Bridged Networking: This option assigns an IP address basedon something external to
the VMware Server itself — a hard-codedaddress that has been physically assigned during
guest OS installation,an addressthat’sbeen set up throughthe organization’sDNSsystem,or a
dynamic addressassigned by the organization’sDHCPserver.In essence, this option makes the
virtualmachine look likeastandardserveron the organization’s network, and is the easiest touse.
I recommendyou use this option.
• Use Network Address Translation (NAT): This option isolates the VMfrom the organization
network by assigning a private IP address tothe virtual machine and translating every
communication between the machine and the outside world (outside of VMware Server,
thatis). This enables the virtual machine to communicate with the organizationnetwork (and
throughit to the restof the world), but protectsthe organizationnetwork fromhaving any
awarenessof themachine.This option would be most useful in sophisticated environments,and I
recommendyou avoid using it for this example.
• Use Host-Only Networking: Host-only networking limits the ability ofthe virtual machine to
communicate to only the host OS and othervirtual machines running on the host. This
capability can be veryuseful where you want multiple virtual machines to be able to speakto
one another, but prohibit the virtual machines from communicatingwith any other systems.
Software engineering and Quality Assurancewould be good uses for this networking option;
however, since we’reexperimenting, I recommend you avoid this option.
• Do Not Use a Network Connection: This option is appropriate if youtruly want a standalone
system. I doubt you really want to do thatnow, so I recommend you avoid this option at this
time.

35

6. For the purposes of this particular example, select the Use BridgedNetworking option
and then click Next.
The Specify Disk Capacity dialog box appears, invitingyou to define just how much space on
the local disk you want to allocatefor the virtual machine. Depending on what use you’ll make
of the virtualmachine, you might want to make this larger or smaller. For example, ifyou’re
setting up VMware Server to perform DNS tasks for your organization,it won’t requiremuch
disk space, so you could safely reduce thedefaultamount of storage suggested. On the other
hand, if you aregoingtoinstall your company’s
CRM system on the virtualmachine, you mightverywell need more disk space than the default
amount, and you wouldthereforeincreasethe default amount. If you’rejustexperimenting with
VMwareServerto see how it works, I recommendyou leave the defaultsuggestionas is.
7. Leave the disk capacity setting at the default: 8GB.
This assumes the storage is on the local disk; if you’re using networkedstorage, you’ll need to
make the same disk size choices, but you’ll belocating the machine elsewhere (as you’ll see in
the next step).

8. Decide when to allocate disk space.
You have two choices for how you’d like to create the disk space. You can choose to create all
the disk space at once. This ensures that you won’t run short of disk space because it’s
reserved rightwhen you create your virtual machine. As the wizard notes, itmight take a while

36

to create the virtual machine, as the space allneeds to be allocated and formatted up front. It
doesn’t take longto allocate 8GB, though, so I recommend you select this option.
• You can create the disk space in 2GB chunks as needed. This solutionreduces the time
necessary to create the virtual machine, but itposes the problem that later, when you need to
allocate more diskspace, it won’t be available. You might choose this option if you planto
work with the virtual machine files — doing things like burningthem to DVD or copying them
with Linux utilities. If you’re justexperimenting and don’t plan to do anything fancy with the
virtualmachine files, you don’t need to subdivide the disk space. Also, youwon’t save much
time with this option right now, so I recommend
that you avoid it for now.
9. Click Finish.
VMware Server then goes off to create the virtual machine. While it’s formatting the disk, go
ahead and take a break.
When this process is complete, the VMware Server Console returns, andyou see Fedora 1
listed on the second tab. You’ve nowcompleted the creation of a virtual machine.

Installing an Operating System
After creating a virtual machine, you have to get an operating systeminstalled. If you peek
back at Figure 12-13, the virtual machine’s state is currentlylisted as PoweredOff.
Toinstall the OS, you need to put an installationCDinto the CD drawer of the machine and
then click the StartThis VirtualMachinelink, found under the Commands section on the
Fedora 1 tab of the
VMwareServerConsole. Youcan also install an OS by connecting to an OSinstallableimage
(.iso
format file) or install from an installation CD on aremote machine.To keep it simple, I’m
using the local CD drive, but you can find more informationon the other installation options on

37

the VMware Web site.The information on the tab changes to the standardFedora installation
splash screen. You’re now ready to install Fedora. Hereare a couple of things to keep in mind:


You get a cursor within the virtual machine that you can use to interactwith the
virtualmachine; in this case, your ―interaction‖ involves theFedorainstallation
process.Keep in mind that the mouse and cursor aresharedbetween the host system
and all virtualmachines. If you click themousewithin the screenof the new
virtualmachine, the virtualmachinewill―capture‖the cursor.Toreleasethe cursor so that
you can interactwiththe host system, pressCtrl+Alt and the cursor will jump out to
thescreenof the host system. This might seem complex as a description,butafter you do
it once or twice it will be second nature.



You see the standard Fedora message stating that Fedora will partitionthe disk
during the installation and requesting an OK. This doesn’t meanthat the installation
will format the entire disk of the host system,just that the install program will format
the 8GB of disk space you assignedto the virtual machine. So don’t worry about this
message from theFedora install program. Click ―OK.‖

To get the installation running, press Enter. The installation process (inthis case, the Fedora
installation process) runs through to completion, as shown. If this requires multiple CD swaps,
your new virtualmachine puts up the install splash screen asking you to put in the next CD.
The installation takes just about the same amount of time for a virtualmachine as it would on a
physical server.When the installation process is complete, the new Fedora virtual machine
brings up the standard login panel.

38

Skipping the OS Installation Process
The VM installation process has one drawback: You still have to install theguest OS, and if
putting it onto a physical server takes an hour, putting it ontoa virtual machine will take
around an hour.

39

Wouldn’t it be great if you could get a virtual machine OS installed morequickly? In fact, you
can. Remember, VMware stores the state of a machine inimage files, which are portable. If
someone has already made image files ofthe virtual machine/OS combination you want, you
can copy those imagefiles and import them onto your virtualization software and thus bypass
theOS installation process.
So, what if you want to create a virtual machine with Fedora installed in itwithout all that
installation hassle? Is that possible? Definitely. Imagine for amoment that you were me, the
Virtualization Expert. I’d (you’d) do somethinglike the following.
1. I’d do a search on the Internet for VMware Server Fedora image files and I’d
scroll through the results until I found a set available for torrent download.
2. I’d download the files via BitTorrent into a directory on the machine.If the terms torrent
and BitTorrentare new to you, it’s time to do somemore research. BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer
file-sharing application thatworks with file formats called torrents. Basically, torrents are
small filesyou download to your computer that then enable you to get pieces of amuch larger
file from bunches of other computers on the Web, and thepieces of files are then reconstructed
into one big file on your computer.If you’re not familiar with BitTorrent, it’s worth your while
to getacquainted because it’s a widely used way to share files.
3. In the VMware Server Console, I’d choose File➪
Open. The Open dialogbox would give me
the opportunity to browse for a .vmx file — the fileformat used to store VMware Server
virtual machine information. I’d ofcourse take advantage of that opportunity to find (and open)
the fedorafc6-i386.vmxfile, so that it would appear on a new tab in the VMwareServer
Console.
4. Because I would be opening an existing image file of which this VMwareServer installation
had no record, the VMware Server Console wouldsuggest to me that a new UUID be created
for the new virtual machine. (UUID stands for universally unique identifier, a uniqueVMware
Server identifier for guest machines; since you’re importing avirtual machine, the Server
Console can’t create a UUID at the time ofcreation, so it needs to assign one now, thus the
suggestion.) I, of course,would willingly click OK.


40

5. Back on the fedor3e-fc6-i386 tab of the VMware Server Console, I’d clickthe Start This
Virtual Machine link right there under the Commandsheading, and the virtual machine would
immediately start with the operatingsystem alreadyloaded.That’s it. No extended operating

41

system install. Just download the imagesand then open them with the console as described in
such meticulous detail.
After you’ve installed the images, you might still need to modify the OSbecause it’s probably
a vanilla configuration, but that still has to be a lotfaster than feeding CDs in, one at a time.
Skipping the Application Installation Process
Okay, you have your OS, and now you’re ready to install the application(s)you want on the
virtual machine. And, you guessed it, it’s back to manualinstallation and configuration. Sigh.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could bypassall that installation and configuration work and just
get an app installed superfast? In fact, that’s a possibility. You might be able to skip all that
work byusing virtual appliances — applications delivered as ready-to-go images thatyou can
just plop into the virtualization softwareIn fact, VMware has encouraged people to create
software appliances and
share them. It even hosts the virtual appliances on the VMware Web site. Justgo to
www.VMware.com/vmtn/appliances and checkout the links to all the virtual appliances on the
site. VMware hosts hundredsof virtual appliances of every different type for you to choose
from.

Imagine this scenario: You want to improve customer service for yourcompany. You’ve heard
about this cool new open source CRM product calledSugarCRM, which sounds great, but
you’ve also heard it takes some effort toget installed and configured. But, because you have
VMware Server running,you go to the appliance page and search for SugarCRM. As you can
see inFigure 12-21, you have perhaps a half-dozen SugarCRM virtual appliances tochoose
from. Pick one, any one, and get started.


42

Because the appliances are in the same image format as the Fedora imagediscussed in the
previous section, you go through the same steps: Downloadthe image from the site and then
use the File➪
Open command in the VMwareServer Console to open it on its own tab. Click
the Start This Virtual Machinelink to kickstart the virtual machine, and as Figure 12-22
illustrates, you have
SugarCRM up and running.

If you’ve worked through this last virtual appliance example, you’ll understandwhy I’ve been
talking about the revolutionarynatureof virtualization.Theability to importan image and
immediately begin using the SugarCRMapplicationavoided a minimum of two hours of
installation work. Not tomentionnot needing to figureout how to configureall the
differentsoftwarepiecesto get the SugarCRM application integrated with the
Webserverandback-enddatabase. All for a simple demo.The image file contains the entire
virtual machine, including both the guest OSas well as all software installed on the OS. Think
of it as a file that contains thevirtual machine and everything in the virtual machine. So, when

43

you importthe image file, you need to start the virtual machine; when you do that, all
theapplications within the virtual machine automatically start as well. Note that
the new virtual machine has its own tab in the VMware Server Console; clickingon that tab
brings up the virtual machine for you to interact with.


44

3VMware Workstation

3.1 Introduction
It is the host-based virtualization software provided by VMWARE Inc. It allows multiple VM’s
to run within itself. We can foresee the following major benefits of this type of structure with
respect to school/college/university environment.
3.2 Benefits to College/University:
1. Teach multiple operating systems with a single host computer-Students can ‘own’
their VM while having minimal access to the host computer. Multiple VMs can run
simultaneously on one host, networked and all (for example, a client and a server or
two servers)
2. Easy maintenance and testing-VM provide an easy way to recover deleted or
corrupted operating systems.We just need to copy another one and open
corresponding Virtual Disk Image File(*.vmdk) .Multiple snapshots allow unlimited
‘try this…’ scenarios with a quick return to the system state before we ‘messed up
with the system.
3. Run multiple versions of software-Teachers canteach Office 2007 while previewing
Office 2003 by using two different VMs.For programming and database; write an
application in one version and easily test on another version. We can even test
various Android powered apps in an x86 based VM.
4. Isolate OS from the campus network and host computer-For programming and
networking, run services and write software which might normally interfere with the
host computer or the campus network. This is beneficial so that students may not
interfere with public or campus networks.


45

3.3 Recommendations for system requirements:




Minimum 1 GB RAM, 2+ GB recommended for Vista/7 and Server 2008 virtual
machines.
Minimum 3.0 GHz P4, recommended 2.4+ GHz dual-core CPU or higher
Separate hard drive (80 GB+) for the VMs

3.4 Files created by Workstation:

Extension File Name
.log
<vmname>.log
or
.nvram

VMware.log
<vmname>.nvram

Description
This is the file that keeps a log of key VMware
Workstation activity. This file can be useful in
troubleshooting if you encounter problems. This file is
stored in the directory that holds the configuration
(.vmx) file of the virtual machine.
This is the file that stores the state of the virtual
machine's BIOS.

or
.vmdk

nvram
<vmname>.vmdk

This is a virtual disk file, which stores the contents of
the virtual machine's hard disk drive.
A virtual disk is made up of one or more .vmdk files. If
you have specified that the virtual disk should be split
into 2GB chunks, the number of .vmdk files depends on
the size of the virtual disk. As data is added to a virtual
disk, the .vmdk files grow in size, to a maximum of
2GB each. (If you specify that all space should be
allocated when you create the disk, these files start at
the maximum size and do not grow.) Almost all of a
.vmdk file's content is the virtual machine's data, with a
small portion allotted to virtual machine overhead.
If the virtual machine is connected directly to a physical
disk, rather than to a virtual disk, the .vmdk file stores
information about the partitions the virtual machine is
allowed to access.

<diskname><###>.vmdk

Earlier VMware products used the extension .dsk for
virtual disk files.
This is a redo-log file, created automatically when a
virtual machine has one or more snapshots. This file
stores changes made to a virtual disk while the virtual
46

.vmsd

<vmname>.vmsd

.vmsn

<vmname>Snapshot.vmsn

.vmss

<vmname>Snapshot<###>.vmsn
<vmname>.vmss

.vmtm
.vmx

<vmname>.vmtm
<vmname>.vmx

.vmxf

<vmname>.vmxf

machine is running. There may be more than one such
file. The ### indicates a unique suffix added
automatically by VMware Workstation to avoid
duplicate file names.
This is a centralized file for storing information and
metadata about snapshots.
This is the snapshot state file, which stores the running
state of a virtual machine at the time you take that
snapshot
This is the file which stores the state of a snapshot
This is the suspended state file, which stores the state of
a suspended virtual machine
.Some earlier VMware products used the extension
.std for suspended state files
This is the configuration file containing team data.
This is the primary configuration file, which stores
settings chosen in the New Virtual Machine Wizard or
virtual machine settings editor. If you created the virtual
machine under an earlier version of VMware
Workstation on a Linux host, this file may have a .cfg
extension
This is a supplemental configuration file for virtual
machines that are in a team. Note that the .vmxffile
remains if a virtual machine is removed from the team.

[Source: http://www.VMware.com/support/ws5/doc/ws_learning_files_in_a_vm.html]

3.5 Networking Modes in virtualization environment:
Each VM has its own virtual network adapter (NIC). Multiple network adapters are
possible within a single VM. There are various networking modes for VMs
1. Bridged networking: The VM acts like any other computer on the network.Each VM
network adapter gets its own IP address and physical address.VMs can communicate
with other VMs and other physical computers on the network including the Internet.
It is the most flexible configuration possible.
2. Network Address Translation (NAT)/Shared Networking: VM ‘shares’ IP address with
host computer.Host computer acts like router/firewall.VM can access other
computers on the network including the Internet.Other computers cannot access the
VM directly. It is more secure configuration than bridged. It won’t work if the VM is to
be a server
3. Local/Host only networking: VMs can communicate with only other VMs (Virtual PC)
or other VMs and the host PC (VMware).No communication with other physical
computers or the Internet is possible.This configuration is ideal for doing activities
that might interfere with the classroom network.

47

4. None:No network connection is possible. It is the most secure configuration. It is the
best configuration when no interaction with other computers, including the host, is
desired.

3.6 Installation OF VMware Workstation:
The following procedure shows how to select a particular version of software and hoe
to install the software on Windows based machine. For video instructions use this link
[4]:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=CSW5112j9u8

1. Selecting your Host System: VMware Workstation is available for both Windows and
Linux host computers. The installation files for both host platforms are included on the
same CD-ROM. Your serial number allows you to use VMware Workstation only on
the host operating system for which you licensed the software. If you have a serial
number for a Windows host, you cannot run the software on a Linux host, and vice
versa.
2. Upgrading from Previous Versions: You can only have one version of VMware
Workstation installed at one time. You must uninstall any previous version of
VMware Workstation before installing a new version. . You also cannot have VMware
Workstation installed on the same host machine with another VMware product, such as
VMware GSX Server, VMware ACE, or the VMware Virtual Machine Console. The only
VMware product that can share a host machine with Workstation is the
VMwareVirtualCenter client software. If you plan to install VMware Workstation on a host
machine that already contains another VMware product, you must uninstall that product
first.

3. Installing the software:
1. Log in to the Windows host system as the Administrator user or as a user who is a
member of the local Administrators group.
2. Open the folder where the VMware Workstation installer was downloaded. The
default location is the Downloads folder for the user account on the Windows host.
Note: The installer file name is similar to VMware-workstation-full-xxxxxxxx.exe, where xxxx-xxxx is the version and build numbers.
3. Right-click the installer and click Run as Administrator.
4. Select a setup option:
o Typical: Installs typical Workstation features. If the Integrated Virtual
Debugger for Visual Studio or Eclipse is present on the host system, the
associated Workstation plug-ins are installed.
o Custom: Lets you select which Workstation features to install and specify
where to install them. Select this option if you need to change the shared
virtual machines directory, modify the VMware Workstation Server port, or
install the enhanced virtual keyboard driver. The enhanced virtual keyboard
driver provides better handling of international keyboards and keyboards
that have extra keys.

48

5. Follow the on-screen instructions to finish the installation.
6. Restart the host machine.

3.7 CREATING A NEW VIRTUAL MACHINE
When you want to create a virtual machine in Workstation, you typically use the New Virtual
Machinewizard. You can create a virtual machine in a minimum number of steps by selecting
the typicalconfiguration option in the New Virtual Machine wizard.With Workstation, you can
also clone virtual machines from existing virtual machines or virtual machine templates,
import Open Virtualization Format (OVF) and third-party virtual machines, create virtual
machines that remote Workstation users can use, and create virtual machines on remote hosts.
Following steps are required in creation of VM [4].
Selecting a Guest Operating System:
The New Virtual Machine prompts you to select the source media for the operating
system that will run inside the virtual machine. You can specify an installer disc inserted
in a physical drive, an ISO image file, or you can instruct the New Virtual Machine
wizard to create a virtual machine that has a blank hard disk.If you select an installer disc
or an ISO image file and the operating system supports Easy Install, the guest operating
system installation is automated and VMware Tools is installed. If the installer disc or
ISO image file contains a product key number and is already set up to perform an
unattended installation, the only benefit of using Easy Install is the automatic installation
of VMwareTools.If you instruct the New Virtual Machine wizard to create a virtual
machine that has a blank hard disk, the wizard prompts you to specify an operating
system and version and you must install the guest operating system manually after the
virtual machine is created. Workstation uses this information to set the appropriate
default values, name files associated with the virtual machine, adjust performance
settings, and work around special behaviors and bugs in the guest operating system. If
the operating system you plan to install is not listed in the wizard, select Other for both
the operating system and version.If you are installing an operating system that supports
Easy Install but you do not want to use Easy Install, you can instruct the wizard to create
a virtual machine that has a blank disk and install the guest operating system manually.
Providing Easy Install Information:
When the New Virtual Wizard detects an operating system that supports Easy Install, the
wizard prompts you for information about the guest operating system. After the virtual
machine is created, the guest operating system installation is automated and VMware
Tools is installed.For Windows guest operating systems, you must provide the following
Easy Install information.


49

Specifying the Virtual Machine Name and File Location:
The New Virtual Machine wizard prompts you for a virtual machine name and a directory for
the virtual machine files.The name of the default directory for virtual machine files is derived
from the name of the guest operating system, for example, Microsoft Windows 7 (32-bit).
For standard virtual machines, the default directory for virtual machine files is located in the
virtual machine directory. For best performance, do not place the virtual machines directory
on a network drive. If other users need to access the virtual machine, consider placing the
virtual machine files in a location that is accessible to those users.
Virtual Machines Directory: Workstation stores standard virtual machines in the virtual
machines directory.The default location of the virtual machines directory depends on the host
operating system.
Table:Default Virtual Machines Directory
Host
Operating
System
Windows XP
Windows Server 2003
Windows Server 2008
Windows Vista
Windows 7
Windows 8
Linux

Default Location
C:Documents
and
SettingsusernameMy
DocumentsMy Virtual
Machines
usernameis the name of the currently logged in user.
C:Users username DocumentsVirtual Machines
usernameis the name of the currently logged in user.
homedir/VMwarehomediris the home directory of the
currently logged in user.

Specifying Disk Capacity for a Virtual Machine
If you instruct the New Virtual Machine wizard to create a new virtual disk during a custom
configuration, the wizard prompts you to set the size of the virtual disk and specify whether to
split the disk into multiple virtual disk (.vmdk) files.Avirtual disk is made up of one or more
virtual disk files. Virtual disk files store the contents of the virtual machine hard disk drive.
Almost all of the file content is virtual machine data. A small portion of the file is allotted to
virtual machine overhead. If the virtual machine is connected directly to a physical disk, the
virtual disk file stores information about the partitions that the virtual machine is allowed to
access.You can set a size between 0.001GB and 8TB for a virtual disk file. You can also select
whether to store a virtual disk as a single file or split it into multiple files.SelectSplit virtual
disk into multiple files if the virtual disk is stored on a file system that has a file size
limitation. When you split a virtual disk less than 950GB, a series of 2GB virtual disk files are
created. When you split a virtual disk greater than 950GB, two virtual disk files are created.
The maximum size of the first virtual disk file is 1.9TB and the second virtual disk file stores
the rest of the data.After you create a virtual machine, you can edit virtual disk settings and
add additional virtual disks.


50

Customizing Virtual Machine Hardware
You can click Customize Hardware on the last page of the New Virtual Machine wizard to
customize the virtual machine hardware.
You can change the default hardware settings, including memory allocation, number of virtual
CPUs, CD/DVD and floppy drive settings, and the network connection type.

3.8 Create a Typical Virtual Machine
When you select the typical configuration option in the New Virtual Machine wizard, you
create a virtual machine in a minimum number of steps.
You must select a custom configuration if you need to create a virtual machine that has a
hardware compatibility setting that is different from the default hardware compatibility setting,
select the I/O controller type for the SCSI controller, select the virtual disk type, configure a
physical disk, or allocate all virtual disk space rather than let disk space gradually increase.
See Using VMware Workstation for information about creating a custom configuration.
Procedure
1. Start the New Virtual Machine wizard.
2. Select Typical to create a typical virtual machine.
3. Select the source of the guest operating system.
Option

Description

Use a physical disc

Select the physical drive where you inserted the
installation disc.

Use an ISO image

Type or browse to the location of the ISO image file.

Install
the
guest
operating system later

Create a virtual machine that has a blank disk. You
must install the guest operating system manually
after the virtual machine is created.

4. Specify information about the guest operating system.

Option

Description

If you are using Easy
Install

Type the Easy Install information for the guest
operating system.


51

If you are not using
Easy Install

Select the guest operating system and version. If the
guest operating
system is not listed, select Other for both the
operating system and
Version.

5.

Type a virtual machine name and type or browse to the directory for the virtual
machine files.
6. Select the virtual disk size and specify whether to split the disk into multiple files.
(Optional) Click Customize Hardware to customize the hardware configuration. You
can also modify virtual hardware settings after you create the virtual machine.
(Optional) Select Power on this virtual machine after creation to power on the
virtual machine after it is created. This option is not available if you are installing the
guest operating system manually.

7. Click Finish to create the virtual machine.
3.9 Installing and Upgrading VMware Tools
Installing VMware Tools is part of the process of creating a new virtual machine. Upgrading
VMware Tools is part of the process of keeping virtual machines up to current standards.For
the best performance and latest updates, install or upgrade VMware Tools to match the version
of Workstation that you are using. Other compatibility options are also available.
VMware Tools is a suite of utilities that enhances the performance of the virtual machine’s
guest operating system and improves management of the virtual machine.Although the guest
operating system can run without VMware Tools, many VMware features are not available
until you install VMware Tools. For example, if you do not have VMware Tools installed in
your virtual machine, you cannot use the shutdown or restart options from the toolbar. You
can use only the power options.You can use the Windows Easy Install or Linux Easy Install
feature to install VMware Tools as soon as the operating system is finished installing.The
installers for VMware Tools are ISO image files. An ISO image file looks like a CD-ROM to
your guest operating system. Each type of guest operating system, including Windows, Linux,
Solaris, FreeBSD, and NetWare, has an ISO image file. When you select the command to
install or upgrade VMware Tools, the virtual machine’s first virtual CD-ROM disk drive
temporarily connects to the VMware Tools ISO file for your guest operating system.The most
recent versions of the ISO files are stored on a VMware Web site. When you select the
command to install or upgrade VMware Tools, the VMware product determines whether it has
downloaded the most recent version of the ISO file for the specific operating system. If the
latest version has not been downloaded or if no VMware Tools ISO file for that operating
system has ever been downloaded, you are prompted to download the file.The installation
procedure varies, depending on the operating system.

3.10 Install New Software in a Virtual Machine

52

Installing new software in a virtual machine is similar to installing new software on a physical
computer. Only a few additional steps are required.
Procedure
1. Select the virtual machine and select VM > Settings.
2. On the Hardware tab, select Memory, set the final memory size for the virtual
machine, and click OK. Some applications use a product activation feature that creates
a key based on the virtual hardware in the virtual machine where it is installed.
Changes in the configuration of the virtual machine might require you to reactivate the
software. Setting the memory size minimizes the number of significant changes.
3. Install the new software according to the manufacturer’s instructions.
3.11 Using Virtual Machines:
When you use a virtual machine in Workstation, you can transfer files and text between the
host system and the virtual machine, print to host printers, connect removable devices, and
change display settings.You can also use folders to organize and manage virtual machines, and
take snapshots to preserve virtual machine states.With more advanced Workstation features,
you can map virtual disks, set up shared folders to share files between virtual machines and
between virtual machines and the host system, share virtual machines with remote users, and
use virtual machines on remote hosts. See Using VMware Workstation for complete
information on these and other advanced features.
Start a Virtual Machine
You can start a virtual machine from the VM menu or from the toolbar. When you use the
VM menu, you can select a soft or hard power option or start the virtual machine in BIOS
setup mode.
When you use Workstation to connect to a remote server, you can start virtual machines on a
remote host.
Prerequisites


If the virtual machine does not appear in the library, select File > Open and browse to
the virtual machine configuration (.vmx) file.

Procedure



To select a power option when you start the virtual machine, select the virtual machine
and select VM >Power.
Option

Description

Power On

(Hard option) Workstation starts the virtual machine.

Start Up Guest

(Soft option) Workstation starts the virtual machine


53

and VMware Tools
runs a script in the guest operating system. On
Windows guests, if the
virtual machine is configured to use DHCP, the
script renews the IP
address of the virtual machine. On a Linux,
FreeBSD, or Solaris guest, the
script starts networking for the virtual machine.
Power On to BIOS



Workstation starts the virtual machine in BIOS setup
mode.

To start the virtual machine from the toolbar, select the virtual machine and click the
start button.

Shut Down a Virtual Machine
You can shut down a virtual machine from the VM menu or from the toolbar. When you use
the VM menu, you can select a hard or soft power option.You are not required to power off a
virtual machine that is running on the local host system before you exit Workstation. You can
exit Workstation and leave the virtual machine running in the background.
Procedure


To select a power option when you shut down the virtual machine, select the virtual
machine and select

VM > Power.
Option

Description

Power Off

(Hard option) Workstation powers off the virtual
machine abruptly with
no consideration for work in progress.

Shut Down Guest

(Soft option) Workstation sends a shut down signal
to the guest operating
system. An operating system that recognizes the
signal shuts down
gracefully. Not all guest operating systems respond
to a shutdown signal
from Workstation. If the guest operating system does
not respond to the
signal, shut down from the guest operating system as
you would a
physical machine.


54






To shut down the virtual machine from the toolbar, select the virtual machine and click
the stop button.
The stop power control setting that is configured for the virtual machine determines
whether Workstation performs a hard or soft power off operation. The configured
behavior appears in a tooltip when you mouse over the button.
To shut down a virtual machine that is suspended, select the virtual machine and click
VM > Power >Power Off.

Pause and Unpause a Virtual Machine
You can pause a virtual machine multiple times for a few seconds, or up to several minutes.
The pause feature is useful when a virtual machine is engaged in an lengthy, processorintensive activity that prevents you from using the host system to do a more immediate task.
Procedure


To pause a virtual machine, select the virtual machine and select VM > Pause.

The virtual machine display dims and a play button appears over the display. Paused virtual
machines that are configured to display on more than one monitor have a play button on each
monitor.



To pause all of the powered-on virtual machines without interacting with the
Workstation user interface, right-click the virtual machine status icon located in the
notification area on the task bar of the host computer and select Pause All Virtual
Machines.



To unpause a virtual machine, click the play button on the virtual machine display or
deselect VM >Pause.

Suspend and Resume a Virtual Machine


You suspend a virtual machine when you want to save its current state. When you
resume the virtual machine, applications that were running before the virtual machine
was suspended resume in their running state and their content is unchanged.


55



How quickly the suspend and resume operations perform depends on the how much
data changed after you started the virtual machine. The first suspend operation
typically takes longer than subsequent suspend operations. When you suspend a virtual
machine, Workstation creates a virtual machine suspended state (.vmss) file in the
working directory.

Using the Drag-and-Drop Feature
You can use the drag-and-drop feature to move files and directories, email attachments, plain
text, formatted text, and images between the host system and virtual machines. Dragging email
attachments is especially useful in Unity mode.





You can drag files or directories between the following locations.File managers, such
as Windows Explorer, on the host system and virtual machines.
A file manager to an application that supports drag-and-drop.
Applications, such as zip file managers, which support drag-and-drop extraction of
individual files.
Different virtual machines.

When you drag a file or folder between the host and a virtual machine, Workstation copies the
file or folder to the location where you drop it. For example, if you drop a file on the desktop
icon of a word processor, the word processor opens a copy of the original file. The original file
does not include changes that you make to the copy.
Initially, the application opens a copy of the file that is stored in the temp directory. On
Windows, the temp directory is specified in the %TEMP% environment variable. On Linux
and Solaris, the temp directoryis /tmp/VMwareDnD. Save the file in a different directory to
protect changes that you make.

Using the Copy and Paste Feature
You can cut, copy, and paste text between virtual machines and between applications running
in virtual machines.
You can also cut, copy, and paste images, plain text, formatted text, and email attachments
between applications running on the host system and applications running in virtual machines.
Copying and pasting email attachments is especially useful in Unity mode. Use the normal hot
keys or menu choices to cut or copy and paste.


56

Add a Host Printer to a Virtual Machine
You can print from a virtual machine to any printer available to the host computer without
having to install additional drivers in the virtual machine.
The Workstation printer feature uses ThinPrint technology to replicate the host system printer
mapping in the virtual machine. When you enable the virtual machine printer, Workstation
configures a virtual serial port to communicate with the host printers.
Procedure


Select the virtual machine and select VM > Settings.



On the Hardware tab, select Add.



In the Add Hardware wizard, select Printer and Finish.



The default device setting is to connect the virtual machine printer when the virtual
machine is powered on.

Use a Removable Device in a Virtual Machine
You can connect and disconnect removable devices in a virtual machine. You can also change
the settings for a removable device by modifying virtual machine settings.
Procedure



To connect a removable device, select the virtual machine, select VM > Removable
Devices, select the device, and select Connect. If the device is connected to the host
system through a USB hub, the virtual machine sees only the USB device, not the hub.



A check mark appears next to the name of the device when the device is connected to
the virtual machine and a device icon appears on the virtual machine taskbar.



To change the settings for a removable device, select VM > Removable Devices,
select the device, and select Settings.



To disconnect a removable device, select the virtual machine, select VM > Removable
Devices, select the device, and select Disconnect.


57

Changing the Virtual Machine Display
You can change the way Workstation displays virtual machines and virtual machine
applications. You can use full screen mode to make the virtual machine display fill the screen
and use multiple monitors, and you can use Unity mode to display applications directly on the
host system desktop.
Use Full Screen Mode
In full screen mode, the virtual machine display fills the screen and you cannot see the borders
of the Workstation window.
Procedure



To enter full screen mode, select the virtual machine and select View > Full Screen.



Press Ctrl+Alt+right arrow to switch to the next powered-on virtual machine and
Ctrl+Alt+left arrow to switch to the previous powered-on virtual machine.



When in full screen mode, you can also use the tabs on the full screen toolbar to switch
between powered-on virtual machines.



To hide the full screen toolbar while you are using full screen mode, click the push pin
icon on the full screen toolbar and move the mouse pointer off of the toolbar.



The toolbar is unpinned and slides up to the top of the monitor and disappears.



To show the full screen toolbar after it has been hidden, point to the top of the screen
until the toolbar appears and click the push pin icon.



To exit full screen mode, on the full screen toolbar select View > Full Screen, and
deselect Full Screen.

Report Battery Information in the Guest
If you run a virtual machine on a laptop in full screen mode, configure the option to report
battery information in the guest so that you can determine when the battery is running low.
Procedure

58

Select the virtual machine and select VM >Settings.On the Options tab, select Power.
Select Report battery information to guest.
Click OK to save your changes.

Use Exclusive Mode
Like full screen mode, exclusive mode causes the Workstation virtual machine display to fill
the screen. You might want to use exclusive mode to run graphics-intensive applications, such
as games, in full screen mode.
Procedure
Enter full screen mode.

Select View > Exclusive Mode from the full screen toolbar.

Use Unity Mode
You can switch virtual machines that have Linux or Windows 2000 or later guest operating
systems to Unity mode to display applications directly on the host system desktop.In Unity
mode, virtual machine applications appear on the host system desktop, you can use the virtual
machine Start or Applications menu from the host system, and the virtual machine console
view is hidden. Items for open virtual machine applications appear on the host system taskbar
in the same way as open host applications.
On host system and virtual machine applications that are displayed in Unity mode, you can use
keyboard shortcuts to copy, cut, and paste images, plain text, formatted text, and email
attachments between applications. You can also drag and drop and copy and paste files
between the host system and the guest operating system.
If you save a file or attempt to open a file from an application in Unity mode, the file system
you see is the file system inside the virtual machine. You cannot open a file from the host
operating system or save a file to the host operating system.
For some guest operating systems, application windows in Unity mode can appear only on the
monitor that is set as the primary display when you have multiple monitors. If the host and
guest operating systems are Windows XP or later, the application windows can appear on
additional monitors.
Unity mode is not available in full screen mode on Windows.
Procedure
To enter Unity mode, select the virtual machine and select View > Unity.

59

The console view in the Workstation window is hidden, and open applications appear
in application windows on the host system desktop. A check mark appears next to
Unity in the View menu.

To display the virtual machine Start menu on a Windows host system, point to the
Start menu on a Windows host system.

To display the virtual machine Applications menu on a Linux host system, point to the
upper-left corner of the primary monitor on the Linux host system.

To navigate between multiple Start or Applications menus when multiple virtual
machines are in Unity mode, press the arrow keys, Tab, or Shift+Tab to cycle through
the virtual machine menus and press Enter and the spacebar to select a virtual machine.

To exit Unity mode, select View > Unity and deselect Unity.
Taking Snapshots of Virtual Machines
Taking a snapshot of a virtual machine saves its current state and enables you to return to the
same state repeatedly. When you take a snapshot, Workstation captures the entire state of the
virtual machine. You can use the snapshot manager to review and act on the snapshots for an
active virtual machine.
Using Snapshots to Preserve Virtual Machine States
A snapshot includes the contents of the virtual machine memory, virtual machine
settings, and the state of all the virtual disks. When you revert to a snapshot, you
return the memory, settings, and virtual disks of the virtual machine to the state they
were in when you took the snapshot.
You might want to take snapshots in a linear process if you plan to make changes in a
virtual machine. For example, you can take a snapshot, continue to use the virtual
machine from that point, take another snapshot at a later point, and so on. You can
revert to the snapshot of a previous known working state of the project if the changes
do not work as expected.
For local virtual machines, you can take more than 100 snapshots for each linear
process. For shared and remote virtual machines, you can take a maximum of 31
snapshots for each linear process.
If you are testing software, you might want to save multiple snapshots as branches
from a single baseline in a process tree. For example, you can take a snapshot before
installing different versions of an application to make sure that each installation begins
from an identical baseline.

60

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