Radderfire's Virtual Machine Experiment

radderfire

radderfire

radderfire

Soldato
Joined
24 Sep 2007
Posts
5,353
Hi All

I am posting this message from a Virtual Machine copy of my XP Home Acer Aspire One netbook, which I created using VMWare Standalone Converter, which is running in VMWare Workstation on my Vista Business laptop. This is FREAKIN AWESOME, I'm so happy I have finally managed to get this to work ...

That is all. :cool:

Rgds

Radderfire
 
May as well post some info in here about it, save the thread getting locked. Is it a physical machine copy to a VM file? What are the steps? Was it easy?
 
It's a copy of my netbook that can now run on my laptop. I might do more of a guide later once I've got it all mastered, but in a nutshell, the steps are:

Install VMWare Converter Standalone on netbook.

Run the Converter, click on the Convert Machine button and go through the wizard. This creates two files which is the virtual machine.

Transfer the two files to the laptop via a network connection (I couldn't transfer them via my external USB drive because they are too large for FAT system).

Download a trial version of VMware Workstation to the laptop. Start this, and in the startup screen there's an option to Open an existing VM. Click this and browse to your two files, one is a .vmx file, open that.

Your netbook should now load as a virtual machine. I could activate XP Home using the code on the bottom of the netbook.

Voila! Marvel at modern technology.

I am however having a few more problems turning a Vista Business laptop into a VM. I might have to buy a separate copy of Vista Business, we'll see ...

Rgds
 
VMWare is awesome. I use it when I need to do things in Windows XP or Linux, and to test the Win7 betas. Amazing piece of software.
 
I used it a lot when takijng my vista exams (VMWare Workstation)

Really nice to be able to setup a few VM's and run through practices on them without messing up my machine config, you can also use snapshots to save states so you can roll back to a previous state :)
 
Sounds like a great idea and pretty cool, I don't understand the actual 'point' of it.

I can see why it could be useful for testing OS's and stuff, but other than that, is there any reason for it?
 
You can also use Suns Virtualbox rather than VMWare Workstation as that will mount pretty much all the virtual disks

Kimbie
 
D D Danneh said:
Sounds like a great idea and pretty cool, I don't understand the actual 'point' of it.

I can see why it could be useful for testing OS's and stuff, but other than that, is there any reason for it?
Click to expand...

For me it is a business continuity issue. At the moment, if my laptop develops a problem, it can take ages to sort things out. If I was always working with a virtual machine, and had an up to date copy of the virtual machine, I could just go back to that. It allows you to have a working copy of your present computer which you can save on another computer.

Rgds
 
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