The nice guys at VMware released a product called VMware Player recently which allows you to run virtual machines that others have built using their paid applications like VMware Workstation, etc. Well, they were nice enough to open the virtual disk format and the virtual machine descriptor file formats to the public which means that with a little ingenuity you can make your own virtual machines by hand and have a free virtualization application for your home use. Again, I suggest that you buy the real application if you intend on using this for work or business.

Of course you need to go to the VMware Player page on the VMware website and download and install the VMware player according to their instructions first, then we can move on to building our virtual machine.

To make our virtual machine, we first need a disk image. We will use our friend from a previous slide Qemu to make this disk image. First grab the latest version of Qemu (0.8.0 or later) from their website. I suggest grabbing the binary tar.gz file an uncompressing it into the root directory like so:

tar -zxvf qemu-0.8.0-i386.tar.gz -C /

Next, create yourself a virtual disk image like so (we are creating a 5 gigabyte one for Ubuntu):

qemu-img create -f vmdk ubuntu.vmdk 5G

Next you need a virtual machine descriptor file. The easiest way to build this is using a template. I have a Windows based one here and a Linux based one here. You need to open these with a text editor and edit them according to your needs. We'll open one up now and go over a few of the high points of editing these files.

Now we can start our virtual machine like this:

vmplayer ubuntu.vmx

Here is a link to an article about making your own virtual machine for use with VMware Player. It has a listing of all of the guest OS strings that are valid along with some other useful links. Searching the internet can provide you with most of the various settings that are valid in the file format. I will put a link to VMware's info that they have released about the file format as soon as I find one.

I highly suggest installing VMware Tools in your guest OS after building it. Usually you'd have to build the virtual machine with VMware Workstation to get this functionality, but you can actually download VMware Workstation for free and extract the ISO images of the tools, then mount them as your virtual machine's cdrom drive and install them. I have the alternate line remarked out in my template virtual machine descriptor files to do this. The ISO images are located in the vmware-distrib/lib/isoimages/ directory once you have extracted the VMware Workstation package.