I recently received an email from a guy who has done a very nice tutorial on how to use VMware Player. His tutorial includes a section on EasyVMX. It's clearly written and easy to understand, so I decided to share it here on the blog.

His article is called Using VMware Player to Create Images for New Virtual Machines.

I'm sure a lot of people will be happy to know that VMware 2.0 is finally released.

This major release introduces VI Web Access, VMware remote console, USB 2.0 device support, increased RAM support (8GB instead of 3.6GB per virtual machine), improved 64-bit guest support, native 64-bit host support on Linux, quiesced backups of virtual machines, a VMCI Sockets interface, and hot add and remove for SCSI hard disks.

You can get VMware Server 2.0 from VMware.com.

VMware Player just got upgraded to version 2.5.

This release introduces Unity View (integrating guest applications with the host), an installer bundle for Linux hosts providing a graphical UI wizard, and accelerated 3D graphics (DirectX 9 accelerated graphics with shaders up through Shader Model 2.0) on Windows XP guests. Operating system support was expanded. Several other enhancements and performance improvements were made.

Go to the VMware Player page to download the latest version.

If you prefer to play around with pre-configured virtual machines, you can get as many as you want from the VMware Virtual Appliance Marketplace.

The standards body IEEE has a list of something that's called OUI. If this is a new TLA (Three Letter Acronym) for you, it expands to Organizational Unique Identifier.

An OUI is actually one or more ranges of MAC adresses assigned to an organization that's issuing network cards (real or virtual).

And wouldn't you know, XenSource, recently acquired by Citrix, has it's own OUI.

This prompted a new release of EasyMAC, the MAC address generator.

The new features are:

• Generation of valid XenSource MAC addresses.
• A new option to output only the MAC address, without any extra text.

Head over to the download page for more info and downloads.

Today, Monday, February 11, 2008, virtual machine number 500.000 was created by EasyVMX!

I can safely say that this never happened before. Now, join me on the quest for the first million!

Happy new year to everybody!

Frustrated by the fact that I'm trying to kick the habit of using moist snuff (or in Swedish, snus), I have done a small design tweak.

The inside of the Virtual Machine Creators (EasyVMX!, SuperSimple and v2.0) has never really looked very well. This is an attempt to make it look a little better.

The two pictures above show the change from worse to better.

(By the way, if you're wondering... The snus quitting is not a new year's resolution, it's just taken more time than I thought it would. :( )

A lot of us have asked and begged and hoped for a long time that VMware would distribute VMware Tools freely. A very nice step in the right direction was including the Tools in VMware Player. Not only for people rolling their own virtual machines, but also due to the fact that Player can run MS Virtual PC/Server images and Backup Exec system recovery images.

Now our prayers have been heard, and VMware added their own little twist that I never expected:
VMware Tools are now Open Source Software, licensed under GNU GPL v2.0 and the LGPL 2.1.

Here are the reasons why VMware chose GPL/LGPL (from the FAQ):

We chose the GPL v2 for the kernel components to be consistent with
the Linux kernel's license.
We chose the LGPL v2.1 for the user level components because some of the
code is implemented as shared libraries and we do not wish to restrict 
proprietary code from linking against those libraries.
For consistency, we decided to license the rest of the userlevel code
under the LGPL v2.1 as well.

Much more than just distributing VMware Tools, this will enable more operating systems (i.e. the newly open sourced QNX) to work inside VMware. Besides, there is nothing stopping the code (or parts of it) from being included in the Linux kernel.

If you are running a Linux distribution with sub-par support for VMware Tools, there's even some documentation available for you.

The hardware address generator EasyMAC! has been updated to version 1.1. It's now more suitable for any kind of use, not only for VMware.

After reading an article at the OpenVZ Wiki, I saw that people are using this little tool for other purposes than making MAC addresses for VMware.

So, the tool now makes completely random global MAC addresses, in addition to VMware specific addresses.

Head over to the download page for more info and downloads.

VMware player is actually quite a versatile piece of software. Chances are that you get yourself a virtual machine or two (as a virtual appliance or maybe you use EasyVMX! to create them), and you get on with your life.

With the new features of VMware Player 2.0, that's not bad at all.
You get shared folders, experimental support for SMP (more than one CPU), full Vista support, Drag-and-Drop between the host and the guest, USB 2.0, dynamic screen resolution, better sound support and much more.

Just running a virtual machine by itself may sound neat. But you can also use this in a QA process, or maybe even use it to distribute software.

But VMware Player has a few tricks up it's sleeve that you may not know about.

VMware Products

First of all, VMware Player can run virtual machines created by all the other VMware products. VMware Workstation, ESX Server, VMware Server and GSX Server.

Virtual PC/Server

But wait, there's more! Did you know that VMware Player could run MS Virtual PC and Virtual Server images?
Running VPC images is super smooth, thanks to the fact that VMware Player now includes VMware Tools. VMware Tools are all the drivers and applications that make an operating system work perfectly in a virtualized environment.

System Recovery

The VMware Player usability doesn't stop there.
Users of Symantec's Backup Exec can actually run System Recovery system images directly in Player. This is quite a feature for all you system administrators out there!