If you already have a Windows PC, you can install Linux and run your existing Windows configuration as a virtual machine. Jason Perlow explains how to do it.
For many Linux users, VMware has become an indispensable tool. While excellent emulation solutions, such as Wine and CrossOver Office can run selected mainstream Windows applications directly on top of Linux without virtualization or actual Windows code, only virtualization can provide perfect Windows compatibility. VMware makes the desktop computing experience complete.
However, virtual machine images of full operating system installs take up considerable hard drive space and consume more memory than emulation. And what’s hardest to swallow is having to re-install Windows (or the virtualized operating system of choice) and supplemental applications in the virtual machine. If you’ve been using a particular operating system instance for any length of time, chances are you have a legion of files, preferences, and software you want to keep. Moreover, you may not have your original install media, or you may prefer to retain a specific version of an application rather than upgrade. You may even want to dual-boot to your existing Windows install because it has games or other packages that donÕt work as well when virtualized.
Well, little did I know that the free, end-user VMware products — VMware Player and VMware Server — can run your existing, on-the-metal Windows configuration virtualized within Linux using a technology that’s really only known to users of VMware’s enterprise product, ESX Server, a part of their Virtual Infrastructure 3 suite. The technology, known as RAW Device Mapping (RDM), is a virtualized SCSI device compatibility mode that enables a virtual machine to boot from…
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