VMWare

Information and articles about VMWare Workstation, VMWare Server and VMWare Player

VMWare is a company specializing in virtualization products which allows guest “virtual machines” to run inside a host operating system. They have a number of products including the free VMWare Player and VMWare Server applications, and paid for applications such as VMWare Workstation.

I have been using VMWare Workstation since 2003 to run Microsoft Windows XP inside my Linux host computer so I can continue to run applications such as Adobe Photoshop and test websites with Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox on a native Windows platform. It’s also extremely useful for testing out Linux distributions without having a dedicated computer to install them onto.

I returned to using Windows in 2008 but continued to use VMWare for testing IE and running my development Linux web server; from 2010 I switched to OSX and continue to virtualize Windows for testing web applications on Internet Explorer.

Keyboard shortcuts to switch between running VMWare Virtual Machines

I run VMWare Workstation on a Linux host machine with multiple virtual machines as my day to day desktop environments: one with Linux as my primary desktop with email, development environment, web browsing etc, and the second with Windows XP to run applications like Adobe Photoshop, CD label printing, and to test websites in Internet Explorer.

I have VMWare Workstation running in full screen mode, and there’s a nifty little auto-hiding toolbar that sits at the top of the screen with access to the VM settings and to be able to switch between the other virtual machines.