VMware Fusion 3 Tutorial Part Three

VMware Fusion 3 Tutorial Part Three
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Continued from Part 2: Tweaking The Settings On Your New Virtual Machine

The next option is to configure your virtual machine’s RAM usage. You want this setting to be set to the maximum amount as possible, while still giving OS X plenty of RAM to use. Understand that however much RAM you allocate to the virtual machine, will be taken away from OS X. If too much is allocated to the virtual machine, OS X will freeze up. If not enough is allocated to the virtual machine, OS X will run fine, but your virtual machine will run poorly. As a rule of thumb, allocate half of your RAM to the virtual machine. Do so by sliding the slider. Keep in mind that there are 1024MB in a GB. So, if your Mac has 2GB of RAM, slide the slider to 1024MB. If your Mac has a lot of RAM, like 6-8GB, than you don’t necessarily need to use half of it for the virtual machine. 2GB should do fine. After you are done with the RAM settings, click the Show All button. You should be back at the Settings menu.

Setting Virtual Machine Hard Drive Space

Click the Hard Disks icon. This is probably the most important step of setting up your new virtual machine. Select your Mac’s hard drive from the left hand side of the window. In the right hand side of the window, you will see a slider allowing you to set the size of your virtual machines hard drive. Understand that whatever you adjust this setting to will take that amount of hard drive space from your Mac computer and give it to your virtual machine. For example, if you have a 160GB hard drive in your Mac, and set the slider to 60GB, you will have 100GB of usable space for OS X, and 60GB of usable space for your virtual machine (windows). OS X will still show up as having a 160GB hard drive, but anything you add to your virtual machine will diminish that value. Alternatively, if you check the hard drive usage in your virtual machine (windows) it will show up as having 60GB of space, total.

Also, understand that what you choose now for hard drive space is very difficult to change in the future. You cannot just slide this slider again anytime that you want more disk space. If you try to, the slider will slide, but Windows or any other virtual machine you may have will not recognize it.

Trying to add more hard drive space to your virtual machine in the future will require partitioning of your Mac’s hard drive and transferring it to your virtual machine to use, which is not a simple process.

After you are done setting the hard drive space, make sure that there is a checkmark in the “Pre-Allocate Disk Space” box. Click Show All, and exit the window.

Finalizing

Now back in the New Virtual Machine Assistant window, click the Finish button. This will automatically launch your new virtual machine. From here, it’s just like installing an operating system on any computer. You will have to wait for setup to finish, which can take up to an hour. When it finishes, you will have a new operating system installed through VMware Fusion 3. Be glad that you tweaked the settings and did everything right now. Adjusting these settings after a virtual machine is created can be a hassle.

This post is part of the series: Installing VMware Fusion 3 To Your Mac and Adding Virtual Machines

This three part series on VMware Fusion 3 shows you how to install VMware Fusion 3.0 to your Apple computer as well as add new virtual machine. The complete tutorial also offers some very useful advice that you should know on how to tweak the settings of your virtual machine.

  1. How To Install An Operating System With VMWare Fusion 3 Part 1
  2. How To Install An Operating System With VMWare Fusion 3 Part 2
  3. How To Install An Operating System With VMware Fusion 3 Part 3