23/11/2008

VMWare ESX Server, "Guest Operating System" and .vmx files

In ESX Server, the "Guest Operating System" must be specified when creating a virtual machine. This results in certain (virtual) hardware components being used.

Guest Operating System as shown by the GUI


Virtual Machine Hardware Properties
The screenshot below shows the Hardware properties applied after selecting "Microsoft Windows XP Professional (32-bit)" as the Operating System.


Virtual Machine Configuration File ".vmx"
Virtual Machine configuration details are stored as a file with a .vmx extension. These are simply text files with specific fields that define the virtual machine configuration.
Relevent entries for the configuration above are shown below:

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