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Information and articles about VMWare Workstation, VMWare Server and VMWare Player

VMWare is a company specializing in virtualization products which allows guest "virtual machines" to run inside a host operating system. They have a number of products including the free VMWare Player and VMWare Server applications, and paid for applications such as VMWare Workstation.

I have been using VMWare Workstation since 2003 to run Microsoft Windows XP inside my Linux host computer so I can continue to run applications such as Adobe Photoshop and test websites with Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox on a native Windows platform. It's also extremely useful for testing out Linux distributions without having a dedicated computer to install them onto.

I returned to using Windows in 2008 but continued to use VMWare for testing IE and running my development Linux web server; from 2010 I switched to OSX and continue to virtualize Windows for testing web applications on Internet Explorer.

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Send Ctrl+Alt+Delete to VMWare Fusion

Posted November 7th, 2012 in VMWare

The login screen on the Windows Server editions require the Ctrl+Alt+Delete keyboard combination to login in. So how do you send this combination to a virtual machine running on VMWare Fusion on a Mac? There are 4 ways to do it.

Posted January 31st, 2010 in VMWare

I use VMWare Server on several different computers to run virtualized Linux webservers for developing websites and for testing various versions of Internet Explorer. I recently needed to reduce the size of a Linux virtual disk to fit it onto a USB stick to copy to another machine but simply deleting files does not reduce the size of the disk image. This post links to another article offsite which shows how to do this and adds a couple of notes about it.

Posted June 7th, 2009 in VMWare

VMWare Server 2 uses a web browser based system called VMWare Infrastructure Web Access to manage virtual machine configurations etc. This post is simply a reference for the address and port to access the web console.

Posted June 5th, 2009 in VMWare

I recently replaced my Windows Vista desktop/host machine with Windows 7 Release Candidate and switched from VMWare Server version 1 to VMWare Server version 2. Version 2 uses a web based management interface and each virtual machine can be accessed in a separate remote console.

I needed to connect a USB printer to one of the virtual machines and was surprised to not see any USB devices shown in the "Devices" drop down box in the remote console.

Posted May 16th, 2009 in VMWare

Some time back I had a rant about Ctrl+Z suspending VMWare Virtual Machines when I somehow managed to trigger the shortcut key which pulls focus out of the virtual machine while I'm typing. The other day I had an email telling me how to fix the problem and have written about it here.

Posted March 7th, 2009 in VMWare

Just over a year I posted how to install VMWare Tools on a Linux Guest Virtual Machine which specifically looks at installing VMWare Tools for Red Hat / CentOS. I recently set up a Debian 5 Lenny virtual machine using VMWare Server and installed the VMWare Tools and the process is fairly similar but I had a couple of issues due to it being a base install with no compiler so thought it a good idea to post how to install VMWare Tools on a Debian 5 Virtual Machine.

Posted September 20th, 2008 in VMWare

After installing VMWare tools on a Linux VMWare guest operating system you might get the "VFS: busy inodes on changed media" error message repeating on the console. This post looks at the simple solution to get rid of the repeating message.

Posted July 18th, 2008 in Linux/Unix/BSD and VMWare

I've just set up a new VMWare virtual machine with Kubuntu 8.04 and the scroll wheel on my mouse didn't work. The steps to correct this are pretty simple and are covered in this post. This should work for any Ubuntu/Kubuntu variant when running in VMWare.

Posted June 20th, 2008 in VMWare

VMWare Server 1.0 doesn't support the same set of features as the more recent versions of VMWare Workstation and VMWare Player, so you may not be able to open virtual machines created with more advanced features. However by simply modifying the configuration file you may be able to start up the virtual machine anyway, as shown in this post.

Posted May 8th, 2008 in VMWare

A couple of days ago I decided to try out Beta 2 of the free VMWare Server version 2. After installing it on Windows Vista I attempted to log into the VMWare Infrastructure Web Access but got an error message saying "Access Denied". This post looks at how to successfully log into the web access console on Windows Vista.

Posted February 17th, 2008 in VMWare

VMWare Workstation and the various flavours of VMWare Server allow you to install a package called "VMWare Tools". These VMWare Tools contain various methods of communication between the guest virtual machine and the host and in general should make the guest VM run better. This post looks at how to install VMWare Tools on a Linux guest machine, specifically on a CentOS guest (and therefore should be the same for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora and their derivatives).

Posted February 10th, 2008 in VMWare

VMWare Server Console allows you to connect to a VMWare Server virtual machine running either on your local machine or a remote machine. The remote machine might be on your local network or located somewhere on the Internet. This post looks at how to deal with the error message in the VMWare Server Console "unable to connect to remote host: cannot connect to remote host x.y.z.a: connection refused" when trying to connect.

Posted January 3rd, 2008 in Linux/Unix/BSD and VMWare

I currently run VMWare Workstation on my desktop computer, using the Linux host operating system to mainly just run the VMWare sessions; I run two main desktop environments (Linux and Windows XP) and one development webserver (CentOS) in Virtual Machines. Just over a month ago I was using SUSE Linux as my main desktop computer, and just using a Windows XP virtual machine, but after upgrading from 10.2 to 10.3 things started to go wrong so I changed to running my desktops on VMWare instead, with a fresh install of Kubuntu 7.10 as my primary Linux desktop / virtual machine.

Posted December 26th, 2007 in VMWare

VMWare's virtualisation products are great. But I have one thing I need to have a rant about. The "suspend" function uses the Ctrl+Z keyboard shortcut and there doesn't seem to be any way to be able to change it. If there is, suggestions about how to change it are welcome.

Posted November 25th, 2007 in VMWare

I run VMWare Workstation on a Linux host machine with multiple virtual machines as my day to day desktop environments: one with Linux as my primary desktop with email, development environment, web browsing etc, and the second with Windows XP to run applications like Adobe Photoshop, CD label printing, and to test websites in Internet Explorer.

I have VMWare Workstation running in full screen mode, and there's a nifty little auto-hiding toolbar that sits at the top of the screen with access to the VM settings and to be able to switch between the other virtual machines.

Posted November 22nd, 2007 in Linux/Unix/BSD and VMWare

I have become increasingly dissatisfied with openSUSE, particularly since upgrading from 10.2 to 10.3 with a large number of breakages and general instability after the upgrade and am currently moving to a new setup with all my day to day desktop operating systems running as virtual machines in VMWare.

Posted October 31st, 2007 in VMWare

You can install vmware tools on a guest machine in vmware server using an ssh session, but after installing it, vmware tools must be configured by issuing the vmware-config-tools.pl command. This configuration script actually stops the network connection completely, so you cannot install it from an ssh session. If you attempt to do so you'll see a message like this:

"It looks like you are trying to run this program in a remote session. This program will temporarily shut down your network connection, so you should only run it from a local console session. Are you SURE you want to continue?"

Posted October 4th, 2007 in VMWare

After upgrading from openSUSE 10.2 to 10.3 I had issues trying to connect my USB Canon Pixma ip4300 printer to the Windows XP virtual machine running on VMWare Workstation. After a fair bit of messing around I managed to get it to work when plugging in multiple USB devices and ensuring focus was kept on the guest operating system.

Posted September 23rd, 2007 in VMWare

After I unwittingly upgraded from openSUSE 10.2 to openSUSE 10.3 last week, the Linux kernel upgraded from 2.6.18.2-34 to 2.6.22.5-18. I run VMWare Workstation on this desktop machine, and each time the kernel is updated VMWare must be reconfigured and the kernel modules recompiled. After the upgrade I got error messages when running vmware-config.pl.

Posted August 9th, 2007 in VMWare

I use VMWare Workstation 6.0 for testing out various Linux distributions either to run live CDs or install a full operating system without having to have a dedicated computer for that specific purpose only.

While playing around with a Linux distribution in VMWare Workstation the other day, I realised I needed to drop to the console, log in as root and do something from the command line. So I hit Ctrl+Alt+F1 expecting this to do it in the virtual machine, but it instead dropped my host operating system to the command line console. Not quite what I was expecting, but as I quickly remembered, Ctrl+Alt has special meaning in VMWare Workstation as a way of releasing keyboard and mouse control from the guest and returning it to the host.

Posted July 16th, 2004 in Applications and VMWare (Updated May 24th, 2005)

VMWare is virtual machine software that lets you run a guest operating system inside your operating system without having to reboot your computer. This article covers an error that can happen which prevents VMWare from starting up in the event of a crash.

Posted March 10th, 2005 in Applications and VMWare

This article covers how to install VMWare on Gento Linux if you are getting errors like the "/etc/init.d/vmware: line 919: [: -: integer expression expected" error when trying to configure the VMWare options.