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VMware ACE Administrator’s Manual
Configuring Hard Disk Storage
in a Virtual Machine
Like a physical computer, a VMware ACE virtual machine stores its operating system,
programs and data files on one or more hard disks.
The New Virtual Machine Wizard creates a virtual machine with one disk drive. You can
use the virtual machine settings editor (VM > Settings) to add more disk drives to
your virtual machine, to remove disk drives from your virtual machine or to change
certain settings for the existing disk drives.
This section describes the choices you can make in setting up hard disk storage for
your virtual machine.
Virtual Disk Basics
In the most common configurations, VMware ACE creates virtual hard disks, which are
made up of files that are typically stored on your host computer’s hard disk.
A virtual disk is a file or set of files that appears as a physical disk drive to a guest
operating system. While you are working in VMware ACE Manager, the files can be on
the host machine or on a remote computer. When an end user installs a package, the
virtual disk files are always stored locally.
When you configure a virtual machine with a virtual disk, you can install a new
operating system onto the virtual disk without repartitioning a physical disk or
rebooting the host.
IDE virtual disks can be as large as 128GB. SCSI virtual disks can be as large as 256GB.
Depending on the size of the virtual disk and the host operating system, VMware ACE
creates one or more files to hold each virtual disk.
By default, the actual files used by the virtual disk start out small and grow to their
maximum size as needed. The main advantage of this approach is the smaller file size.
Smaller files require less storage space and result in a more compact package for
distribution to your end users. They also are easier to move if you want to move the
virtual machine to a new location. However, it takes longer to write data to a disk
configured in this way.
Virtual disks can be set up as IDE disks for any guest operating system. They can be set
up as SCSI disks for any guest operating system that has a driver for the LSI Logic or
BusLogic SCSI adapter available in a VMware ACE virtual machine. You determine
which SCSI adapter to use at the time you create the virtual machine.