Creating a Virtual Machine with Vmware-server

This tutorial will walk you through creating a new virtual macine with Vmware-server. Vmware Server can be donwloaded here.

If you have problems with the installation and cannot find the answer to your problem on google, please visit the forums and give a detailed description of your problem and I will try to help.

Once Vmware-server is installed, you can start her up, and you should see something similar to this.

Click on "Create a new virutal machine" or go to File-->New-->Virtual Machine.
The first screen just informs you that you will be walked through the process of creating the machine. Hit Next.
No need to get fancy the first time around, click "Typical" and click Next again.
This next screen is where you choose the type of machine you want to create.

Choose "linux" and then scroll down in the drop down menu untill you see the version of linux you would like to install. If it is not listed, simply choose "other linux 2.4.x Kernel" at the bottom of the list. Hit Next.
Here, you can choose the name and path of the virtual machine.

Make the name pertinent to what you are installing. For example, if I were installing fedora 8, I would call my machine "fedora8". You also want to make note of the location that you are saving the machine to. In my case, I always save my machiens to /home/chad/vmware.
Once you are happy with these choices, hit next.

This is the screen where you choose what type of networking you would like for the virtual machine. In most cases you want your virtual machine to be able to access the internet. If this is the case for you, choose "Use Bridged Networking".

If for some reason, you would like to just test this machine out without it being connected to the internet, you could choose "Do not use a network connection". Also, if you only want your virtual machine to talk to the host machine, you can use host-only networking. This is great for advance security testing, because you can limit the access the virtual machine has to the outside world while you do penetration and virus testing on it. However, for novice users, the default choice of "use bridged networking" will be just fine. Once you have made your decision, hit Next.

Here we find the Hard drive capacity and settings page. It should look like this.

I've listed the typical settings that I use. There is no reason not to make a large hard disk on your machine, because if you unchuck "allocate disk space now" and "split disk int 2GB files", your disk space is truely virtual and will grow virtually as you add things to your virtual machine. In other words, when you do a base install, your disk size will only be about 2-3 gigs. As you add software to your virtual machine, the disk space will grow on its own. So technically, you can have a virutal machien that has a 250 gig hard drive, sitting on your 80 gig laptop. Pretty cool huh??

Once you are set with your hard disks, hit Finish.

Congratulations, you now have a virtual machine. However, this machine does not have an operating system on it yet. You should pop one in your cd drive and get going!