Invisible wrote:
> What I tend to do is install an OS or install an application, 

There's a disk mode for that, but sure, that works. If you're going to 
discard the snapshot, it's not a problem.

The other thing people use snapshots for is so they can either try someth
ing 
that might break things, or to make the vdisk back-up-able while it's run
ning.

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

That's it.

> 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...

Right. The problem comes when you run out of host disk space while the VM
 
thinks there's still a bunch left.  If the VM is for playing around, then
 
you can worry much less about such.

You're aware that Vista and later comes with a free (but incompatible wit
h 
VMWare) VM system, right?  See if you have a program called "virtual PC" 
around.

> 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.)

They're just not allocating the space in advance. I was talking about if 
you 
*do* allocate space in advance, then your *backups* could still be small.
 
Also helpful when you tend to unpack a 50G tarfile, do something with it,
 
then throw it away, leaving yourself a 50G empty vdisk file.

> 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!)

It's like any other OS. You could run things on a remote machine and cont
rol 
them from your desk, and stuff like that. I'm not really familiar with it
.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Human nature dictates that toothpaste tubes spend
   much longer being almost empty than almost full.

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