Wednesday, May 02, 2007

Build VMware player compatible virtual machines for free

If you have VMware Workstation then this post is not for you since the Workstation has all the bells and whistles to create and maintain virtual machines using visual tools.

So if you don’t have the above mention (and highly recommended) tool you can use alternative methods to create virtual machines for VMware Player:

Use VMware Server

This is also available for free from VMware. If you happen to use the VMware Server for server virtualization in your organization then you should have no problems at all to open a VMware Server virtual machine with VMware Player.

Use easyvmx.com

Using the online tools from easyvmx.com you can generate virtual machines startup files. Although pretty complex the tool doesn’t have the visual advantages of previous solution.

Use VMX Builder

This is a deskop application available from this web site. On the same page you’ll also find a couple of somehow useful utilities.

Edit .vmx files using notepad

Even .vmx files are text files do this only as a last resort or for minor and easy to do changes. You can even generate disk images using only Windows command line tools.

For an virtualization overview and available technologies check first this article.

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