A Simple Way To Create Virtual Disks
VMWare’s virtualization technology allows you to run other operating systems within your native OS, but VMWare Player doesn’t provide an easy way to create the disk images to host your guest OS. Enter the online service Virtual Machine Creator.
VMC allows you to set up a VMPlayer compatible virtual machine with options for machine name, guest OS, memory size and drive space. Once you have everything set to your liking you can download a zip file with the necessary config and disk image files.
From there it’s just a matter of installing the OS of your choice and booting up the new virtual disk.
I should point out that VMC is not affiliated with VMWare and uses QEMU, not actual VMWare tools, to generate the disk images.
It’s true that you could just download the free VMWare Server product, which allows you to create new disk images and if you’re making a lot of images, that’s probably a faster way to go in the end. However if you just want to make one image and then run it with VMWare Player, the online option is quicker and easier and there’s no fiddling with the installation of the server product (which I found a bit tricky in Ubuntu 7.04).
[via Simon Willison]
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