Alan Kleymeyer

VMWare has been around for over 10 years.  It’s an amazing piece of technology.  I’ve not had a chance to use it until now.  VMWare let’s you run “virtual” OS s on your computer using virtualization. This is how VMWare defines virtualization:

Today’s x86 computer hardware was designed to run a single operating system and a single application, leaving most machines vastly underutilized. Virtualization lets you run multiple virtual machines on a single physical machine, with each virtual machine sharing the resources of that one physical computer across multiple environments. Different virtual machines can run different operating systems and multiple applications on the same physical computer.

Basically, it means you can run ANY version of Windows on a single Windows PC, or on a single Mac or a single Linux machine.  You can also run any version of Windows on a Mac which is what we have standardized on at TabbedOut. We get 13in Macbook Pros with 4 Meg of memory and a large external monitor.  We then install VMWare and run whatever version of windows we need to on it!  This combined with Spaces for the Mac makes for a pretty nice development environment.

A few notes about VMWare Fusion:

• To rename a VM, go to VM Library, select the VM you want to rename, select settings, then click on the name to change it in place.
• To rename the folder containing a VM, remove the VM from the VM Library by selecting delete and removing it from the list but be sure to KEEP the file so you don’t remove it from disk.  Then just rename the folder and reload it back into the VM Library by using the File…Open command
• To increase the hard drive size of a VM you must delete all snapshots, select hard drive settings and increase the hard drive size. Run the VM and in the OS increase the size of the partition.  For XP you must use a 3rd party app as this is not supported natively.  I used the free EASEUS Home edition.

Explanation of files that make up a VM