Change the DHCP IP Address Range for VMware NAT

VMware Workstation includes a network utility that allows you to manage the virtual networks. Typically virtual machines will use NAT (Network Address Translation) to automatically assign a virtual IP address that hides behind your host address, but the default range of 192.168.200.0/24 may not work for everybody.

You can change this address range to anything you like easily. Note that you should not have virtual machines running during this.

First open the Manage Virtual Networks start menu item:

Click the Host Virtual Network Mapping tab, and then click the arrow button next to the VMnet8 dropdown box. VMnet8 is the default NAT adapter for VMware.

Choose the Subnet option, and you will see a dialog where you can change the network range:

Once you have changed the network here, you can click the OK or Apply buttons, and after a few seconds it will update.

Read More

How to Change the Virtual Machine Boot Device in Virtual PC

If you’re trying to install an OS or are testing out boot disks, you might be wondering how to change the boot device. Here’s the quick and easy technique to change it.
What we’re going to do is go into the virtual machine’s BIOS and tweak it there.

Tweaking the Boot Device

First, click on the Ctl+Alt+Del button in your virtual machine so it can reboot.

When the POS comes up (as shown in the image below), you should press the Esc key until you bet into the BIOS menu.

Once in the BIOS menu, navigate using your left and right arrow keys until you get to the Boot menu.

Press Enter on Boot Device Priority and you will see a menu to select your primary booting device.

Use your + and – keys to select your primary boot device. Assuming you will use a CD, DVD or ISO file, you should select your CDROM device as 1st Boot Device.
Then press F10 to save and exit and you will see a screen like this:

After you confirm your changes, your virtual machine will boot and you will be able to begin your installation.

Read More

Make Virtual Machines Always Hide To The System Tray in VMware Workstation

My favorite feature in the latest version of VMware Workstation is that you can run virtual machines entirely in the background. This is most useful for “appliance” machines that you won’t actually use from the prompt, but through a web browser or ssh client.

The only problem is that when you click the close button on the VMware window, you get a prompt saying “Some virtual machines are still powered on. You can continue to run these virtual machines in the background, suspend them for later use, or power them off now.“

I always want my virtual machines to run in the background!

You can disable that window by just telling VMware to always run virtual machines in the background by going to Edit \ Preferences.

Click the checkbox that says “Run powered on virtual machines in background after close”. Now when you click the close button, it will always just minimize the virtual machines to the system tray. Very useful

Read More

Turn Off Debug Mode in VMWare Workstation 6 Beta

VMWare Workstation is great. The version 6 beta has even more awesome features…  but it’s slower than dirt, because debugging mode is turned on by default.

Thankfully there’s a quick and easy trick to turn off debugging, which will increase the speed a lot.

Here’s what we’re going to do:

1. Open an explorer window and browse down to the VMWare install folder. (C:\Program Files\Vmware\VMware Workstation)
2. You’ll see two folders, one named bin and another named bin-debug. 
3. Rename bin-debug to bin-debug-old.
4. Make a copy of the bin folder, and name the copied folder bin-debug.
5. Enjoy Workstation 6 without debugging.

Here’s a screenshot of what the folder structure now should look like:

Read More

How to Increase the VMWare Boot Screen Delay

If you’ve wanted to try out a bootable CD or USB flash drive in a virtual machine environment, you’ve probably noticed that VMWare’s offerings make it difficult to change the boot device. We’ll show you how to change these options.

You can do this either for one boot, or permanently for a particular virtual machine.

Even experienced users of VMWare Player or Workstation may not recognize the screen above – it’s the virtual machine’s BIOS, which in most cases flashes by in the blink of an eye.

If you want to boot up the virtual machine with a CD or USB key instead of the hard drive, then you’ll need more than an eye’s-blink to press Escape and bring up the Boot Menu. Fortunately, there is a way to introduce a boot delay that isn’t exposed in VMWare’s graphical interface – you have to edit the virtual machine’s settings file (a .vmx file) manually.

Editing the Virtual Machine’s .vmx

Find the .vmx file that contains the settings for your virtual machine. You chose a location for this when you created the virtual machine – in Windows, the default location is a folder called My Virtual Machines in your My Documents folder.

In VMWare Workstation, the location of the .vmx file is listed on the virtual machine’s tab.

If in doubt, search your hard drive for .vmx files. 

Open the .vmx file with any text editor.

Somewhere in this file, enter in the following line… save the file, then close out of the text editor:

bios.bootdelay = 20000

This will introduce a 20 second delay when the virtual machine loads up, giving you plenty of time to press the Escape button and access the boot menu. The number in this line is just a value in milliseconds, so for a five second boot delay, enter 5000, and so on.

Change Boot Options Temporarily

Now, when you boot up your virtual machine, you’ll have plenty of time to enter one of the keystrokes listed at the bottom of the BIOS screen on boot-up.

Press Escape to bring up the Boot Menu. This allows you to select a different device to boot from – like a CD drive.

Your selection will be forgotten the next time you boot up this virtual machine.

Change Boot Options Permanently

When the BIOS screen comes up, press F2 to enter the BIOS Setup menu.

Switch to the Boot tab, and change the ordering of the items by pressing the “+” key to move items up on the list, and the “-” key to move items down the list. We’ve switched the order so that the CD-ROM Drive boots first.

Once you make this change permanent, you may want to re-edit the .vmx file to remove the boot delay.

Boot from a USB Flash Drive

One thing that is noticeably missing from the list of boot options is a USB device. VMWare’s BIOS just does not allow this, but we can get around that limitation using the PLoP Boot Manager that we’ve previously written about. And as a bonus, since everything is virtual anyway, there’s no need to actually burn PLoP to a CD.

Open the settings for the virtual machine you want to boot with a USB drive. Click on Add… at the bottom of the settings screen, and select CD/DVD Drive. Click Next.

Click the Use ISO Image radio button, and click Next.

Browse to find plpbt.iso or plpbtnoemul.iso from the PLoP zip file. Ensure that Connect at power on is checked, and then click Finish.

Click OK on the main Virtual Machine Settings page.

Now, if you use the steps above to boot using that CD/DVD drive, PLoP will load, allowing you to boot from a USB drive!

Conclusion

We’re big fans of VMWare Player and Workstation, as they let us try out a ton of geeky things without worrying about harming our systems. By introducing a boot delay, we can add bootable CDs and USB drives to the list of geeky things we can try out.

Download PLoP Boot Manager

Read More

How to Boot a VMware Virtual Machine from a USB Drive

Do you have an OS installed on your USB thumb drive? Booting from it in a VM is now possible, you’ll just have to use a simple trick to get it to work.
All we need to do is to load the Plop ISO in VMware, attach and enable the USB drive in VMware, and finally select the USB option in Plop Boot Manager to boot from the USB.So, visit the Plop boot manager download site.

Click Download, download the latest version, save it in a location, and unzip it. The file named “plpbt.iso” is the one we need to use.

Open VMware, select “Create a new Virtual machine”

In the window that opens, select “Installer Disc image file”, browse to the Plop ISO and select it. VMware will ask you to specify an Operating System. Click next to continue

Select Linux as the Guest Operating System, and from the list of versions, select Ubuntu (or if you have a different OS, select it and its version). Click Next

Specify the name of the VM and the destination where it will be saved.

On the next screen, select “Store Virtual Disk as single file”, and allot 5 GB to it, since we will be booting from the USB drive, and not actually doing an install. Click Next

On the final screen, you’ll see the hardware resources automatically allocated for this particular VM.

Make sure that USB is enabled, and if it isn’t, click “Customize Hardware”, click the USB Controller device, and check the first two options. Click OK to continue.

Make sure your USB drive with a bootable OS is attached. Start the VM, you’ll boot into Plop. First, right click the USB icon on the bottom right corner of VMware Player, and click Connect (Disconnect from Host). Wait a couple of seconds, then click inside the Window, and select the USB option using the arrow keys on your keyboard.

And now you’ll be booting into your OS from the USB. Not only you can boot into Ubuntu from a bootable USB, but you can boot into any bootable OS using this method (DSL, Puppy, or even Windows Installation ISO, whatever bootable OS you have on the USB). Not quite handy perhaps, but still geeky!

---

Download Plop Boot manager

Read More

Allow Access to a VMware Virtual Machine(NAT) From Another Computer

If you are running a virtual machine on your computer, you may want to access that virtual machine from another computer. Let’s use an example: Say you have an Ubuntu virtual machine with Apache running on port 80, and you want to show other people on your network to access the website you are hosting.

We’re going to assume that the virtual machine is using NAT, and has been assigned an IP address of 192.168.23.128.

First open the Manage Virtual Networks start menu item:

Click on the NAT tab, and then click on Edit. You will see the NAT Settings dialog:

Click the Port Forwarding button, and you will see this dialog:

Now we are finally on a screen we can actually use. We’re going to use port 8080 on the host machine. We enter the ip address for the ubuntu virtual machine, and port 80. These ports could be any ports.

We should be able to test this out by going to http://localhost:8080 on our host pc. We can give out the url to our host machine by replacing localhost with the host computer IP address.

Read More