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.

Install VMWare Tools on a Linux Guest Virtual Machine

VMWare Workstation and the various flavours of VMWare Server allow you to install a package called "VMWare Tools". These VMWare Tools contain various methods of communication between the guest virtual machine and the host and in general should make the guest VM run better. This post looks at how to install VMWare Tools on a Linux guest machine, specifically on a CentOS guest (and therefore should be the same for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora and their derivatives).