Creating and Managing Virtual Machines

This chapter helps the administrators to create a virtual machine (VM), install a guest operating system, install VMware Tools, manage virtual machines, and modify virtual machines. From the perspective of software running inside a VM, a VM is really just a collection of virtual hardware resources selected for the purpose of running a guest operating system instance. Creating VMs is a core part of using VMware vSphere, and VMware has made the process as easy and straightforward as possible. Although VMware Tools is not installed by default, the package is an important part of a VM. Installing VMware Tools should be standard practice and not an optional step in the deployment of a VM. VM snapshots allow administrators to create point‐in‐time checkpoints of a VM. The snapshot captures the state of the VM at a specific point in time.