VMWare copy disks?

[cuban]

Hi all,

I currently am using a trial version of VMware for testing stuff at work. I'm a consultant so I go to various customers often. I'm making a virtual PC for use at each client, with tools to admin their applications (mostly Windows). I run Gentoo on the laptop host.

My question is this... I'd rather not install Windows 2000 17 times in VMWare, is there anyway I can install it once then copy the disks to another Virtual machine? I see where you can use exisiting disks (share with another VM) but I don't want to do that. I tried copying over the .vmdk files and using those with a new VM but it gave me a number of errors.

Is my best bet to ghost the machine, then restore the ghost in each VM Session? I can setup a ghost server in a VMSession and do many VMs at once...

I tried searching VMWare's website but their support search function is no good.

Thanks!,
Daniel
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[steveb]

normaly you can just copy the vmdk files and the vmx file. keep in mind, that if you rename the vmdk files you need to edit the vmx file to reflect that change.

cheers

SteveB

[cuban]

I think I tried that and it kept complaining the machine was already in use. I may have copied the whole directory though, and not just the vmdk and vmx files.

I'll check it out.

Thanks,
Daniel
_________________
Tell your ISP to support SPF/SASL AUTH (http://spf.pobox.com) today!

[klarnox]

You may want to try just copying the vmdk files then creating new virtual machines and point them to the copied vmdk files for their disks. If I remember correctly the vmx file contains a system ID of some sort so if you're trying to run more than one of the virtual machines at a time you'll run into problems with VMware thinking the virtual machine is already running.