VMware® Infrastructure 3 FOR DUMMIES®

Chapter 10. Making Virtual Machines

After you build your virtual foundation, it's time to add virtual machines to the mix. Virtual machines consist of two parts: the virtual machine's hardware and the virtual machine's operating system.

In this chapter, we look at the virtual machine file structure, how VMs connect to physical hardware, and the memory management tricks that are used in VMware Infrastructure 3. Then we discuss how to deploy and connect to virtual machines.

Understanding Virtual Machine Makeup

A virtual machine is really just a collection of virtual hardware represented by several files. The files are typically on some type of storage area network (SAN) or network attached storage (NAS), but they can also be stored locally on an ESX host. If stored locally, options such as High Availability (HA), Vmotion, and Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), won't work correctly.

Virtual machine file structure

Whatever name you give your virtual machine is used in all files that define the virtual machine. Because your Service Console is Linux-based, you should avoid using spaces or special characters in the virtual machine's name. The following example is a list of files that make up a virtual machine called VM1. They are all stored in a directory called VM1. One of the first things you do when creating a virtual machine is choosing a name. As you will see, the virtual machine name gets embedded in a lot of the file names that make up the vm:

• VM1.vmx: Virtual machine configuration ...