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CHAPTER 9 Using Virtual Disks
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Adding Drives to a Virtual Machine
VMware ACE virtual machines can use up to four IDE devices and up to seven SCSI
devices. Any of these devices can be a virtual hard disk or DVD or CD-ROM drive. A
virtual machine can read data from a DVD-ROM disc. VMware ACE does not support
playing DVD movies in a virtual machine.
Adding Virtual Disks to a Virtual Machine
Virtual disks are stored as files on the host computer or on a network file server. 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. It does not matter whether the physical disk that holds the files is IDE or
SCSI. A virtual IDE drive can be stored on an IDE drive or on a SCSI drive. So can a
virtual SCSI drive.
Use the virtual machine settings editor (VM > Settings) to add a new virtual disk to
your virtual machine. The virtual machine should be powered off before you begin. If
it is not, shut down the guest operating system normally, then click Power Off on the
VMware ACE Manager toolbar.
Note: If you have a Windows NT 4.0 guest with a SCSI virtual disk, you cannot add
both an additional SCSI disk and an IDE disk to the configuration.
1. Open the virtual machine settings editor (VM > Settings) and click Add. The Add
Hardware Wizard guides you through the steps to create your virtual disk.
2. Click Hard Disk, then click Next.
3. Select Create a New Virtual Disk, then click Next.
4. Choose whether you want the virtual disk to be an IDE disk or a SCSI disk.
5. Set the capacity for the new virtual disk.
If you wish, select Allocate all disk space now.
Allocating all the space at the time you create the virtual disk gives somewhat
better performance, but it requires as much disk space as the size you specify for
the virtual disk.
If you do not select this option, the virtual disk’s files start small and grow as
needed, but they can never grow larger than the size you set here.
You can set a size between 2GB and 256GB for a SCSI virtual disk or 128GB for an
IDE virtual disk. The default is 4GB.