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Using VMware Player
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Options and Features in VMware Player
VMware Player is primarily a vehicle for playing virtual machines, and does not contain the full
feature set found in other VMware products.
VMware Player does provide the following features:
• You can connect and disconnect any preconfigured devices in the virtual machine.
• You can change the amount of memory allocated to the virtual machine.
• You can set the type of network connection for the virtual machine: bridged, host-only, or
NAT.
• You can copy and paste from the virtual machine to the host and vice versa. To use this
feature, you must have VMware Tools installed.
• You can drag files between a Windows host and a Windows virtual machine, if the virtual
machine was configured with this feature. To use the drag-and-drop feature, you must
have VMware Tools installed.
• Virtual machines can be preconfigured to revert automatically to a snapshot of a particular
virtual machine state when you power off. This is useful, for example, in a demo that resets
itself to a clean state when powered off.
• You can set preferences for how commands are displayed in the VMware Player interface
and for how VMware Player closes a virtual machine (by powering it off or by suspending
it) when you exit VMware Player.
For instructions on using these features, see the help provided in VMware Player (Choose
Player > Help).
Note: VMware Player can run only one virtual machine at a time. You must close the virtual
machine currently running in VMware Player before you can open another virtual machine.
Installing VMware Player
The following sections give instructions for installing VMware Player.
To install VMware Player on a Windows host
1. Download VMware Player from the VMware Web site at
www.vmware.com/download/player/. Right-click the appropriate download link for your
host machine (Windows or Linux) and save the application to the hard drive of your host
machine.
If you are installing VMware Player from a CD and your host machine has autorun enabled,
installation instructions are displayed when you load the CD in your CD-ROM drive.
2. If your host machine does not have autorun enabled, copy the file
VMware-player.exe from the Windows directory on the CD to the hard drive of the
host machine.