The Book of VMware

(No Starch Press, 2002, 280 pages, ISBN 1-886411-72-7)

This book is about VMware Workstation, a popular product that provides virtual machines on a PC. With VMware Workstation, you can run multiple operating systems (and all of their applications) at the same time on a Windows NT/2000/XP or Linux machine.

First, I cover the basics: What a virtual machine is, (in particular, the one that VMware Workstation gives you), how to install the product, what it will do to the operating system on your computer, then go into details on the virtual machine interface.

The next part of the book is about guest operating systems. So you know how to install a guest operating system on a virtual machine, but then what? Naturally, you'd like to be able to use it, but one reason that you may be using VMware Workstation in the first place is that you may not be too sure what you're doing, and you'd rather not mess up a real computer. Therefore, I describe common tasks that you may need to do with the guest operating system devices. For example, one of the most annoying things on a strange new operating system is figuring out how to partition and format new disks. This book tells you exactly how to proceed do for systems from DOS to FreeBSD.

Then there are two chapters dedicated to networking. You can do a lot with VMware Workstation's networking; these chapters get you on your feet and going, tell you how to share files between your host and guest systems, and more.

Finally, we have troubleshooting information, and other useful tidbits.

This book ranked in the USENIX Association ;login: journal Top 10 of 2002.

Table of Contents:

  1. Introduction
  2. The VMware Virtual Machine
  3. Installing VMware Workstation
  4. Virtual Machine Configuration and Operation
  5. Windows Guest Systems
  6. Linux Guest Operating Systems
  7. FreeBSD Guest Systems
  8. Other Guest Operating Systems (NetBSD, OpenBSD, Novell Netware, Solaris, and more!)
  9. Host and Guest System Network Configuration
  10. Network Services
  11. Non-Networked File Transfer
  12. Troubleshooting
Updates.

Brian Ward -