[TriLUG] VMware question

[Tanner Lovelace]

On Thu, 2003-01-23 at 13:25, Greg Brown wrote:
> Hey all.  My question is does anyone use VMware to create a vitual Win2k
> machine running under Linux (in my case RH 8.0)?  I know this is what the
> software is supposed to do, but does anyone actually use it?
> 
> That question aside, my other related question is what happens when/if Win2k
> gets hit by some kind of bomb while running under Linux via VMware?
> Hopefully just the directory where Win2k is located gets trashed, right?  I
> imagine this to be the case and I hope that when running under VMware the
> "virtual" Win2k thinks that the it's disk is just what is contained in the
> Linux directory where it is installed.

Hi Greg,

Generally, when installing Win-whatever on VMWare, what you do is
setup a virtual disk that is contained within 1 linux file.  That's
right, the entire windows filesystem is just one file that gets
mounted by vmware (similar to how linux can do a loopback mount).
Even better, if you select it correctly, VMWare will allow you
to create a type of disk that when you exit the virtual machine,
you can choose whether to "commit" the changes you made during
that session to be permanent.  That way, if a virus attacks
and trashes your disk, you can just discard the changes.  If not,
say for instance you installed something new, you can commit the
changes and they'll be there the next time you run the virtual
machine.

At no time does anything happen to the underlying linux filesystem.
(Well, you can mount it using samba, and then bad things can happen,
but it's harder.)

Cheers,
Tanner
-- 
Tanner Lovelace | lovelace(at)wayfarer.org | http://wtl.wayfarer.org/
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