Section 3.7. Solutions Fast Track

3.7. Solutions Fast Track

3.7.1.

3.7.1.1. Virtual Machine Basics

Building a virtual machine is really quite similar to building a regular computer.

All computers, virtual or physical, need a bare minimum of specific hardware such as a CPU (an important one), memory, disk space, and if you want it to talk with other computers on your LAN/MAN/WAN, a network interface card.

Although a contiguous memory space is visible to each virtual machine, the physical memory allocated may not be contiguous.

3.7.1.2. Configuring a Virtual Machine

Every virtual machine needs its own directory. It's good practice to give the directory a name similar to the virtual machine itself.

All running virtual machines need to be on a VMFS volume. The VMFS is a specialized file system used especially for virtual machines.

Disk mode options are definitely one of the more flexible and powerful elements of a virtual machine. Options include Persistent, Nonpersistent, Undoable, and Append Modes.

3.7.1.3. Gold Builds and Clones

The first virtual machine that you build is your Gold Master.

Consider your Gold Master as the parent for the rest of your virtual machines that use the same operating system.

Because your virtual machine is just a small collection of files, creating another virtual machine based on the build of your Gold Master is as easy as copying your virtual disk file, creating a configuration file, and making some small changes.

3.7.1.4. Modify Your Master

Make sure you test any software package or configuration change on a copy of your Gold Master before applying the change to it.

Over time your Gold Master will have to change to keep up with operating system improvements as well as VMware virtual hardware improvements, but VMware allows for enormous flexibility when it comes to testing.

When making changes to your Gold Master, we recommend first putting the virtual disk in Undoable Mode.