Dec 30, 2011 VLK cannot be virtualized either for Windows XP (fine for servers, not for XP). Microsoft has a special virtualization license called VECD that must be used if you want to virtualize XP. However, they are changing their rules in 2 days (literally! 7/31/10) where I believe if you have VLK with SA (must have SA) then you can virtualize using that.
Perl programmer for hire: download my resume (PDF).
Today, after re-reading the 'How-to: VMware Player modification' post on the Hack a Day site, I decided to give my creating a VM that works with the free VMware Player another chance. The instructions given below are based on a post made by Rhys.
If you haven't done so yet, download the Free VMware Player.
Next, you need the qemu-img.exe program that comes with QEMU. If you are using Windows (like I do) you can download QemuInstall-0.7.2.exe. After downloading this program, install it. Start a command prompt and cd to the installation directory of QEMU, for example:
and create a VMware disk file as follows:
If you copy paste the above line into the command prompt (cmd.exe), do not include the prompt (the text before qemu-img.exe). If you do, you get the following error: 'C:Program' is notrecognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.
A file 'WindowsXPPro.vmdk' with a maximum disk size of 2G (the actual file is much smaller; about 320 KB) has been created. You might want to move this file to a different folder.
Note: I have made several empty VMware virtual disk files of various sizes available as a single 21 KB download.
Now, create an empty text file, and rename it to 'WindowsXPPro.vmx' (use the same name as in the previous step, but use vmx as the extension instead). Open the file in an editor and enter the following values:
Note: when I created this file I had only 256 MB of memory, hence the low memsize (just 64 MB).
Insert your Windows XP Professional CD ROM, and double click on the file you just created. The VMware Player should boot the CD, and you can install Windows XP Pro.
Windows XP Pro up and running in a virtual machine
Other versions of Windows
I first tried to install Windows 2000 Professional. When I got the installation process running I stopped the virtual machine, because I wanted to try XP. The value of guestOS was set to 'windows2000pro' in the vmx configuration file.
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VMware Player Related
Free VMware Player - download page
QEMU - a generic and open source processor emulator
Free Operating Systems Zoo - has QEMU installer for Windows
How-to: VMware Player modification - Hack a Day
Edit: I have dedicated a small but growing section of my site to the VMware Player.
Also today
Virtual Machines (overview)
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