FEATURE
How to virtualise your PC for free
"Excellent article thanks! However you might have glossed over the licencing issues involved, at least if you're upgrading from an XP system to a new Vista system. My understanding is that you ..."
Related Articles
Latest Features
Communicating between virtual and physical machines
One thing you need to remember when you have your old machine running as a virtual image is that it doesn’t ‘know’ about it. It’s not aware there’s another operating system (your new PC), upon which it’s running. That means there’s no natural path of access between the physical and virtual machines: you can’t ordinarily access folders on the physical machine or vice versa. VMware Tools does include facilities to share folders between real and virtual machines, but we’ve found them slightly unreliable.
The easiest way to share files between host and guest operating system is in fact to use networking. Just share the folders you need access to on both machines and you can read and write to them over the network interface easily.
If you’re having trouble with networking and need to get files from host to guest, a simple – albeit less than elegant – way to share between the real and virtual machine is to ‘capture’ a USB flash drive before you start the virtual machine. To do that, with the VM powered down in VMware Server, select VM | Removable devices | USB devices and select the drive. When you start up the virtual machine, you can then transfer files to the drive. When you shut it down again, the drive gets given back to the host and you can copy the files into the host OS.
Performance
With the hardware virtualisation features built into modern CPUs, you’ll probably be pleasantly surprised that virtual machines can run almost as fast as native hardware. The exception to that is 3D graphics: you can’t play DirectX games via a virtual machine using VMware Server since there’s no built-in way for a VM to natively access the hardware.
And finally
Being a server app, the VMware Server Console acts differently to a normal local app. Remember that the Console (the main interface window in Server) is a front end through which to connect to and access virtual machines. The machines themselves run independently.
That means quitting the Server Console app won’t stop virtual machines running; they’ll continue in the background, taking up CPU resources and as much physical RAM as you’ve allocated in the virtual machine’s setup options. If you find your physical machine running slowly, you’ve probably forgotten to shut a VM down. You need to suspend or shut down any virtual machines via the Console before you exit the Console.
If you accidentally close the Console before you’ve powered down a VM, don’t worry, the VM isn’t lost: fire up the console again and you can reconnect to it and shut down normally.
1  |
| Load up VMware Converter on your old PC. You’ll get a message asking if you have an enterprise licence. Just click ‘Continue in starter mode’. The main interface window is task-based, which is useful for running in enterprise mode. From the File menu, select New | Convert... to start up the Conversion wizard. |
2  |
| Click Next in the wizard to get through the start-up welcome screen, and Next again to proceed to the Source Type selection. Since we’re converting a real PC, just make sure ‘Physical Computer’ is selected, and hit Next to get to the Source Login page. In this context, the source is the PC you want to virtualise. |
3  |
| On the Source Login dialog, simply check ‘This local machine’ to indicate you want to virtualise the machine you’re sitting at rather than one on the network. This handily greys out the username and password boxes, so you won’t need to worry about domains and such like. |
4  |
| In the Source Data screen, select disks you want to convert. If you have disks that are purely used for data or backup, uncheck these – you only want to convert the operating system and application files. Make sure ‘Ignore page file and hibernation file’ is checked. |
From Betamax to Amiga, here's a list of those IT innovations that fell under the bulldozer. Some were cruelly robbed of their advantage, others threw it away with bad management
The latest Avatar trailer takes a closer look at the battle tech behind the film - but we can't help compare it to James Cameron's Aliens in tone and style.
Videophones, in one form or another, have been around since the 1920's, with some major attempts to create public videophone booths in the 1930's and 1950's. But why didn't they take off in the modern era?