A tutorial on installing and configuring a guest machine using VMware Workstation 9 in Windows Environment

INTRODUCTION

VMware is proprietary software for creating virtual machine. It’s a way of installing an

operating system inside an operating system virtually. The hardware like hard disk, memory

and processor can be inherited form the physical system. We can also call VMware as a

hypervisor. Hypervisor is a piece of software program that is used to create, manage and run

virtual machines. A computer on which hypervisor is running is called host machine. The

virtual machine runs on the hypervisor is called guest machine. VMware is a type 2 hosted

hypervisor. To work with VMware we need a Windows or Linux installed machine. VMware

runs on top of the host operating system, hence it is called as hosted architecture.

Figure 1: VMware Workstation Hosted Architecture

Full virtualization is the technology used by VMware workstation. With Full Virtualization

as the guest OS is fully abstracted (completely decoupled) from the underlying hardware by

the virtualization layer. The guest OS is not aware it is being virtualized and requires no

modification. Full virtualization is the only option that requires no hardware assist or

operating system assist to virtualize sensitive and privileged instructions. It is possible to

install Windows, Unix and Mac operating system in VMware. First we need to configure host

machine with VMware Workstation. We can download VMware Workstation setup from

vmware.com as 30 days trail and the actual cost is 250$. The installation doesn’t need any

configuration even a naïve user can install it by just opening the setup and clicking next. The

home screen of VMware workstation is shown in the figure below.

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

Operating System: Windows 7

Software: VMware Workstation

CPU: Intel Core i3

Memory: 4Gb and above

Hard Disk: 1*80Gb HDD @ 5400rpm

Steps to Install and Configuring Guest Machine

Step 1: The left pane displays the available virtual machines created using VMware and the

right pane used to create and configure virtual machine. In the right pane, the icons

simply explain all the futures. To create a new virtual machine click the icon “Create

a New Virtual Machine”.

Step 2: The wizard opens and asks the user with typical or custom to create a virtual machine.

In typical the VMware itself detect and allocate resources for the guest operating

system. For advanced configuration we need to select custom and click next.

Step 3: Select virtual machine compatibility as workstation 9 which supports most of the

modern operating system till windows 8. If you experienced the operating system

compatible with specific versions of VMware workstation just select form the drop

down list box.

Step 4: To create a virtual machine we must need an installation media like windows or

Linux disk. VMware offers us with two types of media selection. Either we can

install it from physical disk or we can use iso image downloaded from the internet. If

you haven’t planned for installation media select “I will install the operating system

later” and click next.

Step 5: Now it’s time to select the type of guest operating system Linux, Windows, Mac or

Solaris. VMware optimises the hardware according to the guest operating system.

Now we are going to install Ubuntu a flavour of Linux operating system. Select

Linux and in the version select Ubuntu 64bit and click Next.

Step 6: Name your virtual machine. The name is used to identify your virtual machine in the

left pane. To store virtual machine configuration files and virtual hard disk in desired

location select the path by clicking the browse button.

Step 7: Host computer consist of single Intel or AMD processor chip which has many cores

and many threads running on that CPU. We can assign CPU to virtual machines in

terms of cores and threads. Thread means concurrent execution on a processor core.

A typical Intel i3 chip has 2 cores and 4 threads. 4 threads can run on a single core of

Intel i3 chip. As the total processor increases, the processing speed of guest

operating system also increases. Assigning many cores to guest system reduces the

speed of execution in host system.

In VMware the number of processor is related to core.

The number of core per processor related to thread run concurrently on a single core.

Step 8: Slide the ruler to assign the amount of memory (RAM) for guest machine. Usually

Linux systems don’t require much amount of memory. Before installing a guest

operating system read the prerequisite and minimum system requirement and

allocate configuration according to the specification.

Step 9: VMware offers user with three types of networking. Bridged network, Network

Address Translation (NAT) and Host only Network. Bridged network configured

guest machine gets IP address form router, currently the host machine is connected.

The virtual machine is explicitly visible over the network. We can ping the system

with its IP address. Network address translation (NAT) is different from bridged

network where the IP address is provided by VMware workstation. The guest

machine’s network request is transfer to host machine and the host machine serves

the guest machine. The guest machine invisible over the network and users cannot

ping the guest machine. The guest is only visible to host machine. Host only

networking is used to communicate with number of guest machines only. We can

also have two or more network adapters with different configurations.

Step 10: To access the virtual disks, a virtual machine uses virtual SCSI controllers. Each

virtual disk that a virtual machine can access through one SCSI controllers. The

choice of controller does not affect the virtual hard disk type like SCSI or IDE.

Step 11: We have to create virtual hard disk for the storage of virtual machines. We can add

two or more hard disk or we can also use the existing virtual hard disk. VMware

offers an option to mount virtual hard disk as a physical media and explore its

content. Windows can only view the file system formatted with NTFS or FAT32.

Most of the Linux file systems are ext3 and ext4. Click Next to proceed further.

Step 12: Select the technology used to connect the hard disk. Usually host and other are

connected with hard disk using IDE or SATA interface. SCSI is advanced

technology which is most recommended because of the performance in data

transfer.

Step 13: Specify the size of the hard disk. Allocate disk space now will occupy all the given

space form the physical media. Store virtual disk as a single file, pile up all the data

as a single *.vmdk file (virtual hard disk). If the memory of the file is too large it is

difficult to transfer form one system to another. Split virtual disk into multiple files

can omit this bottleneck.

Step 14: Enter the name of the virtual hard disk.

Step 15: Review the configuration of the virtual machine and click finish.

Step 16: We can see the virtual machine is added in the left pane. To further edit the virtual

machine click “Edit Virtual Machine Settings “.

Step 17: We haven’t add the installation disk before. Now browse and locate the iso as an

installation media.

Step 18: To add one or more hardware components click add to open “Add Hardware

Wizard” window. Select the component and click next to configure the particular

hardware. The component will be added to the guest operating system.

Step 19: The execution of the guest operating system inside the VMware hypervisor is shown

in the figure. We can suspend, stop and resume the virtual machine by simple

clicking close button on the particular tab. We can also make it full screen by

clicking the icon in the toolbar.

Step 20: VMware provided with a feature called snapshot. User can take a snapshot of a guest

operating system and can revert back to the particular point. Snapshot can be

managed by using snapshot manager. Snapshots are mostly used in testing

environment.

POINTS TO REMEMBER

1. VMware is proprietary software.

2. VMware Workstation is available for both Windows and Unix environment.

3. For the execution of Guest machine, hardware resource can be inherited from Host

machine.

4. Allocating more resources to Guest machine reduces the performance of Host

machine and leads to system crash.

Document Experimented and

Created by Arunkumar Goge arunkumar.goge@gmail.com www.facebook.com\arunkumargoge @arunkumargoge