Configuring a Virtual Machine, Gold Builds, and Clones

This chapter discusses how to build a virtual machine. It discusses its basic requirements, as well as some issues which need to be considered when building virtuals. The chapter also discusses the concept of the Gold Master, and why this concept is important in building the virtual infrastructure, and how to build the VMlibrary to leverage the power and flexibility of VMware. The chapter explains how to modify the Gold Master according to specific environmental needs. All computers, virtual or physical, need a bare minimum of specific hardware such as a CPU (an important one), memory, disk space, and LAN/MAN/WAN (a network interface card). Every virtual machine needs its own directory. It's good practice to give the directory a name similar to the virtual machine itself. All running virtual machines need to be on a VMFS volume. The VMFS is a specialized file system used especially for virtual machines. Disk mode options are definitely one of the more flexible and powerful elements of a virtual machine. Options include persistent, non-persistent, undoable, and append modes. Because the virtual machine is just a small collection of files, creating another virtual machine based on the build of Gold Master is as easy as copying the virtual disk file, creating a configuration file, and making some small changes.