Creating Your Base Virtual Machine
When starting from scratch I always create what I call a base virtual machine (VM). This VM serves as my base image for all of my needs and will be re-used for various setups. There are few things you need to keep in mind when you create a base image. I’ll mark these as we go along in the screen shots below.[1] Once VMWare Workstation is installed click File->New Virtual Machine.
[4] Install you Os later
[5 ]Choose your Guest Operating System.
[6] Give your virtual machine a name and choose its location. The location ideally will be its own partition. The wizard will automatically create a \Virtual Machines directory. (you can change this)
1.Machine name
2.Location
[7] Choose the number of processors. VMware Server can recognize up to two physical processors. Multicore processors are considered a single physical processor.
[8] Choose the amount of memory the VM will use. This depends on how much total memory you have in your server, and how much you want to allocate to this VM. For Win2008, 1GB is a good amount to start with.
[9] Choose the type of network adapter (NIC) you want to use in your VM. VMware server will install its own network driver. This virtual driver will not be the same as the driver your NIC is currently using for the Host operating system. If your Host computer is on a network, and you want to use a separate IP address for your virtual machine (or can get one automatically from a DHCP server), select "Use bridged networking". Bridged networking creates a "bridge" between the virtual machine and the physical NIC in your Host computer so you can access the network in the same way you would with a standard network card. It connects the virtual network adapter in your virtual machine to the physical Ethernet adapter in your Host computer. For more information on the types of virtual network cards in VMware Server, see the VMware Server online documentation. After you install Windows Server 2008 in your VM, you can change the IP address settings for the Virtual NIC, in Control Panel, just as you would in any Windows operating system.
[10] Doing some reading and research the LSI Logic I/O adapter is supposedly the faster choice for SCSI adapters.
[11] Choose the SCSI controller you will use in your VM. Again, this is a virtual driver and is not dependent on the actually controller and hard drive you have in your Host computer. My test system uses a SATA controller and hard drive and I chose the LSI option. If you choose the BusLogic controller, you receive a warning message that Windows 2003 does not support this. There will also be another screen where you choose what type of Hard Drive to use, IDE or SCSI. You can choose SCSI on this screen too.
Also note that you cannot change the SCSI adapter type after you create the virtual machine.
[12] Disk capacity is something you really need to think about before setting this option. I made the mistake of setting up a complete VM environment only to realize I needed more space. While virtual machines can be resized using the disk manager utility, they cannot be resized if there are clones or snapshots tied to the VM. For me this meant I had to blow away a lot of my work and go back to my base images (which is another reason why I do full cloning to start with as you’ll see later on).
You’ll notice I didn’t choose “Allocate all disk space now”. Essentially what this does is it reserves all of your hard drive space for your VM. Think of it like formatting your VM image files. As noted there is a performance gain. However, this also means you are going to take up as much disk space as you enter in the field below. In my case if this was checked, I’d eat up 50GB of disk space on the drive. Not fun, especially when cloning full images (50GB + 50GB + 50GB). Thus I do not check this option. I do however split the files into 2GB files. The main reason is for defragmentation. If you have one large image file you need twice the amount of space to defrag it. With 2GB files you’ll only need an additional 2GB of space.
[13] The Virtual Machine will now be created. This will take several minutes.
Note: if you create a VM on an existing partition that is already being used, this process could take much longer. Using a new, blank partition makes this process go much faster.
[14] You will now have a new tab with the new Virtual Machine. Now that the VM is created, you can install Windows Server 2008 in the virtual machine.
nice work.
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