Sunday, March 2, 2008

VMWare tips


Wireless networking

By default vmware networks are set up as bridged. However this doesn't work with Vista and wireless networks.

The easy answer is to change the network setup to NAT. However if you are doing server development this may not be much use. In that case, you can try network bridging as described here.

Resizing the vm image.
The easy way is to download the vm converter from here. Amoungst other things (creating an image from an existing computer) this can let you resize an image.

Performance
If you have sufficent system memory, change VMWare settings to fit all virtual machine memory into reserved host ram (Edit menu -> Preferences, memory tab). This will give a performance boost.

Also, preallocate the hard drive space.


Links
VMware Knowledgebase article - http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/dynamickc.do?cmd=show&forward=nonthreadedKC&docType=kc&externalId=1212&sliceId=2&stateId=0%200%209345265
Bridging Process http://mingstert.blogspot.com/2007/12/vmware-wireless-network-adapter-and.html

VM Converter http://vmware.com/products/converter/