How to use Windows Vista in VmWare

**Kool** · 13-01-2009

I am trying to use vista in a vmware setting and i am having trouble and therefore I need help on it and if someone can help me it would be great. It looks like it is working and then it just sits. It states like windows is loading files or something like that. Does it work better in Virtual PC? Thank you.

**newtech** · 13-01-2009

Windows Vista Performance in VMware Workstation 6.0

One of the great new features in VMware Workstation 6.0 is its Windows Vista support. Vista can be used as the host operating system (HOS) and the guest operating system (GOS) for VMware Virtual Machines (VM). The question to us is how well Vista performs in VMware Workstation 6.0. This actually contains two sub-questions. (1) What is the performance of Vista as the HOS? (2) What is the performance of Vista as the GOS? To answer these two questions, we did a comparison of Windows Vista and Windows XP performance.

To answer Question (1), we ran experiments using the same virtual machine on the two different HOS's (Vista and XP) and compared the results. We ran a set of workloads to measure the CPU, memory, disk and network performance of the VM. Vista host performance is on par with XP, except that Vista itself consumes more memory than XP. This means that Vista leaves less memory for the use of VM's than XP.

To answer Question (2), we compared a Vista VM against an XP VM both on an XP host. We ran the same set of workloads as for the Vista host experiments described above. While Vista guest performance is on par with XP in most of our workloads, we did find a few cases that perform worse on the Vista VM than on the XP VM. To understand why Vista was slower in those particular cases, we conducted the same measurements on native physical systems, rather than on virtual machines. We found that Vista is slower than XP on native hardware almost to the same degree as on virtual hardware. This made it clear that VMware Workstation 6.0 wasn't introducing any Vista-specific overheads, and that the relative performance on Vista is as good as on XP.

The chart below shows some representative results from our experiments. The bars represent the ratio of Vista to XP performance when comparing the Host OS, the Guest OS and native. The benchmarks shown are: gzip from the SPEC CPU2000 suite, PassMark PerformanceTest, Iometer disk workloads, Netperf networking send/receive, and boot/halt (time taken to boot and immediately halt the OS). The workloads had minimal variations from run to run, e.g. around 3% in performance.

In conclusion, Windows Vista works great with VMware Workstation 6.0! Go ahead and have fun with our cool virtualization technology!

VMware Workstation 6.0 supports both 32-bit and 64-bit Vista. Our conclusion here holds for both 32-bit and 64-bit.

Source: blogs.vmware.com

**EINSTEIN_007** · 13-01-2009

Installing Windows Vista under VMware Server
VMware Server is the perfect place to test Microsoft Windows Vista. That is because VMware Server is free to download and you don't want to install Vista over your existing operating system. Vista is a significant upgrade to Windows XP and there are so many changes. In the perfect world, installing Vista under VMware would be without issue. However, the world is not perfect and neither is installing Vista under VMware Server. In this article, I will show you how I installed Vista under VMware Server and how to resolve a major issue I ran into.

Creating the Virtual Machine
Prior to the actual installation, you must create a virtual machine inside VMware to house the Vista system. To do this, I went to File, New, Virtual Machine. I clicked Next and took the default of Typical.

For more information refer to this link.

nitesh mehta · 13-01-2009

If you are trying to install Windows Vista RC1 in VMWare Workstation, you may see setup appear to hang on the text-mode screen that says "Windows is loading files...".

Actually what has happened is that Vista Setup is already in graphics mode trying to do things, but something about the way it switches the display adapter into graphics mode is not working right on VMWare.

If I were VMWare I'd be pretty ticked off at Microsoft right now; since Microsoft makes a competitive product, Virtual PC, it is Highly Suspicious that they come out with a major new test release of an operating system that just happens to not work on VMWare Workstation, something which is practically the de facto standard for developers testing new operating systems. Shabby and slimy, Microsoft. They're probably testing Windows Vista with tens of thousands of applications; not testing with VMWare is inexcusable.

There's a workaround, for now, while VMWare works on the problem: edit the virtual machine's .vmx file to include

svga.maxWidth = "640"
svga.maxHeight = "480"

You can get Vista installed in VGA 16 color 640x480 mode (it will look awful) and then when you get everything running, install VMWare tools and take out those two lines and you'll be good to go. Thanks to anonymous user echelon9 from the VMWare board for this tip.

**Kool** · 13-01-2009

Thanks for all the tips.
I have finally gotten Vista to install in Vmware 5 by following these instructions from the Vmware forums:

1. Create a new VM
2. Memory 512MB
3. Hard Disk (IED 0:0) 20GB
4. CD-ROM (IDE 1:0) Pointing to the ISO Image
5. Ethernet 1 "Bridged"

Start VM
1. Boots the DVD
2. When you get to the part where it ask to pick the disk, delete the existing partition.
3. Recreate the partition
4. Exit the install and reboot the VM
5. During the VM BIOS hit F2 then change the boot order to have the CD/DVD be the first boot device
6. Save and Exit the BIOS
7. When you get to the part where it ask to pick the disk again, highlight then choose format
8. Now select again then choose install
9. It will now start the installation process
10. After a couple of reboots and 45 minutes later (depending on your host machine), the install will be done.
11. You are now logged in but no network, video, and sound
12. Install the VMware tools to get the video going
13. After VMWare Tools reboot and the video will be better
14. Still no network or sound, active the VMware tools so the VM can see the tools on drive D:
15. Goto Device manager, right click the ethernet controller, go to properties, then reinstall the driver.
16. During the reinstall it search the CD-ROM (vmware tools) for the right network driver.
17. You should now have network and able to surf the Internet with IE 7, but still no sound
18. Surf to www.soundblaster.com
19. select drivers from the right bottom panel
20. then North America/United States/English then Go
21 then choose Sound Blaster/Other/16PCI then click Next
22. Choose English/Windows XP/Drivers then Go
23. Download the "Driver release for SB PCI 128 Vibra / PCI 16"
24. Run the installer then reboot and viola you should have sound.

Hope all of this help you guys out.

Michael Tomrow · 20-07-2009

Hi there

Well I’m sure that you will found very good information in this page, is a great guide about this topic.
Look in; StarWind iSCSI Target: Using StarWind with VMware ESX Server
Best of luck

**Macarenas** · 20-07-2009

The main problem is that VMWare Virtual Disks are seen by the installer as a RAW disk, and is this not supported in Beta 1. i know two remedies the first is to install Windows XP Servicepack 2 inside the virtual machine, and then upgrade that install by using the Microsoft Vista upgrader. is to use diskpart to create a partition on the virtual disk, before starting the installation. To do this, boot the Microsoft Vista ISO image, and when the first graphical screen turns up press SHIFT+F10 to open a command prompt. Use the Diskpart utility to create a disk partition. diskpart select disk 0 create partition primary Now, you can choose between formatting the partition straight away, by using the following commands . select volume 1 format or format the partition by using the Microsoft Vista installer interface. Either way, you need to reboot the virtual machine and boot on the ISO again to make Vista find the newly created disk and partition. If you selected to format the drive by using Diskpart, install to the partition the installer found. If not, use the installer to format the partition before you can continue installing. The installer doesn't recognize the VMWare virtual graphics adapter (but thats taken care of post install, by installing the VMware tools (VM menu->Install VMWare tools). That takes care of most of the drives needed, especially the network bit. Added: Seems I was jumping the gun a bit there, after installing the VMWare tools, Vista will still not find the correct driver for the VMWare Virtual NIC. To fix this, find the device manager and the non-functional network card. Make sure the "Install VMWare Tools" setting is set in VMWare. Right click the NIC, and select update driver. Browse to the D:\Program Files\VMWare tools\Drivers\vmxnet\win2k folder, and install the driver from there. You will still be missing sound, which I don't find very important inside a virtualized session, but you can always download the "Driver release for SB PCI 128 Vibra / PCI 16" from creative.com to enable the sound as well.