Usage experience of top-level Virtual Machine VMWare

1. supported Guest OS:
VMWare supports the following Guest OS:
MS-DOS, Win3.1, Win9x/Me, WinNT, Win2000, WinXP, Win. Net, Linux, FreeBSD, NetWare6, and Solaris x86.
Unsupported Guest OS:
BeOS, ibm OS/2 and OS/2 Warp, Minix, QNX, SCO Unix, and UnixWare.
2. VMWare simulated hardware
The hardware simulated by VMWare includes: motherboard, memory, hard disk (IDE and SCSI), DVD/CD-ROM, soft drive, Nic, sound card, serial port, parallel port and USB port. VMWare did not simulate a video card. VMWare provides a software package named vmware-tools for each Guest OS to enhance the display and mouse functions of Guest OS.
3. The hardware simulated by VMWare is of a fixed model and has nothing to do with the actual hardware of the Host OS. For example, if you use VMWare to install linux on one machine, you can copy the entire linux to other machines with VMWare to run the tool without having to install it again.
4. VMWare can use an ISO file as a CD. For example, you can directly install the linux ISO file downloaded from the Internet without a dial.
5. VMWare provides three options for running Guest OS:
(1) persistent
All operations performed in the Guest OS are saved to the disk in real time.
(2) undoable
When the Guest OS is shut down, the system will ask whether to save the disk for the operation.
(3) nonpersistend
No operations performed in the running of Guest OS are performed after shutdown.
This is a very useful function for software testing or testing.
Guest OS is not afraid of endless attempts.
6. Two network setting methods for VMWare:
(1) Bridged Mode
In this way, the IP address of Guest OS can be set to the same network segment as Host OS. Guest OS is equivalent to an independent machine in the network, and other machines in the network can access Guest OS, guest OS can also access other machines in the network. Of course, mutual access to the Host OS is not a problem.
(2) NAT
This method can also achieve two-way access between the Host OS and the Guest OS. However, other machines in the network cannot access the Guest OS, and the Guest OS can access other machines in the network through the Host OS using the NAT protocol.
NAT-Based IP Address Configuration method: The Guest OS first uses DHCP to automatically obtain the IP address. The VMWare services in the Host OS will assign an IP address to the Guest OS. If you want to use a fixed IP Address at each start, set this IP address directly in Guest OS.
In general, the Bridged method is the most convenient and easy to use. However, if the Host OS is win2000 but the network cable is not plugged in, the network is likely to be unavailable (most of the machines using PCI NICS). In this case, you can only use NAT.
7. VMWare uses Host OS files to simulate the hard disk of Guest OS. The hard disk of a Guest OS corresponds to files in one or more Host OS. If 100 MB of files are written to the Guest OS, the virtual hard disk file in the Host OS will increase by MB. Delete the 100M file in Guest OS, and the virtual hard disk file in Host OS will not be reduced. This part of space can be used when writing files to Guest OS. Vmware-tools also provides the shrink function to immediately release unused space and reduce the capacity of virtual hard disk files in the Host OS.
To reduce the waste of hard disk space and avoid frequent use of shrink, it is better to mount another hard disk in Guest OS to store infrequently used files, such as installation files, after the disk is used up, you can partition and format the hard disk.
8. vmware-tools
Vmware-tools enhances the display and mouse functions of Guest OS. Vmware-tools comes with VMWare. When installing Guest OS, there is a prompt in the status bar of VMWare that vmware-tools is not installed. Click this button to install vmware-tools. You can also choose settings> vmware tools install from the menu.
If the Guest OS is windows, vmware-tools will be automatically installed. If it is linux, after installation, the installation file of vmware-tools will be mounted to the optical drive (virtual mode, at this time, the optical drive does not have a CD), enter the mount point of the optical drive, and copy the file to install it.
VMWare does not provide vmware-tools for some Guest OS, such as Solaris x86, NetBSD 1.x, OpenBSD 2.x, and Caldera OpenLinux 1.3.
9. install linux in VMWare. Do not install it in graphic mode, but in text mode. When installing Xserver, select the default configuration, and ignore installation errors. After installation, do not start X, install vmware-tools, and then start X.
10. If you do not use a sound card, do not add it to VMWare. The sound card has a slight impact on performance.
11. If you do not often use the optical drive, you can cancel the connect at power on option of the optical drive. When necessary, the optical drive can be "Hot swappable" at any time ".