Darren New wrote:
> Invisible wrote:
>> - I like the "snapshot manager" thingy. That's really nice.
> 
> Be careful you don't turn on the snapshot and leave it for a long time. 
> ("long time" being "more than a day".)  It's writing all the changes to 
> a new file, and when it's time to integrate that back into the main disk 
> (if you want to), it takes a loooooong time if the snapshot is big.  
> Just don't leave it on by accident and work on stuff for a week, or 
> you'll spend five hours putting the changes back in the disk.

Mmm, OK. I'll try to remember to not do that. ;-)

What I tend to do is install an OS or install an application, 
immediately take a snapshot, and then whenever I want to use the VM, 
start from that snapshot. So, like, if I'm going to play around with 
Office for a few hours, I'll go play. But if I then decide I want to do 
something specific and make a new snapshot, I'll restore the snapshot 
from just after when I installed Office, and go from there...

> This is also good info:
> 
> http://www.luisrocha.net/2008/11/splitting-your-vmware-virtual-disk-into.html 

Apparently there's an opion when creating the VM that asks if you want a 
single disk image or multiple such.

One thing I've noticed is that VMs take a surprisingly small amount of 
disk space. I mean, I give each VM an 8GB virtual disk, but I'm using 
nowhere near 8GB per VM. More like 2GB. Which is still a lot, but it's 
an 80GB disk that's 79% free...

> If you're running Linux (or any other OS that's easy to zero unused 
> sectors), you can make disk backups really small by zeroing unused 
> sectors, then copying the files into a compressed directory on Windows. 
> (I suppose gzipping them under Linux would work just as well, for that 
> matter.)

I was wondering if the VMtools it installs would provide a way to do 
this... but if it does, I don't see one. As for compression... does 
VMware not do that itself anyway? The snapshots look a *hell* of a lot 
smaller than the main disk image... (Like, less than 1GB each.)


Also... apparently VMware Player can do more than, um, play VMs now? (I 
just looked at what it would cost to buy myself a copy of VMware 
Workstation, but it's like £150 or something!)

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