advice needed on VMWARE !

[Nusku08]

OKay, after my last post
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=425157

I took the plunge and installed VMware - so far its great ! Installed MSOffice to mess around with and it works better than it ever did on my old PC.

As I explained in my earlier post the reason for getting a Windows environment on my MBP is so that I can install the Database which is used at work.

Now my question is this: Once a techie from work has installed Dataease on my MBP I still want to be able trash and re-instal leopard whenever I choose but I don't want to have to get DataEase re-installed, so what is the best way to isolated Dataease from everything else??

Can I install the "virtual machine" on a seprate partition so that if I re-install leopard all I will need to do is then re-install VMware and point it at the partition ?????

I'm completely new to VMWARE so I have no idea what is the best practice.

many thanks

[Freyqq]

you can install vmware 2 ways

if you install it on a seperate partition through bootcamp then your windows partition is completely seperate from your OSX partition, so it won't be affected at all if you reinstall OSX

if you install it on your OSX partition without bootcamp, then your windows through vmware is basically just a big file ( i think). So, just put that file on an external drive or something as a backup.

I don't have vmware only bootcamp but i'm pretty confident that this is how it works.

[Komiksulo]

To recap: Windows and VMWare are two separate things.

VMWare is a program that, running on OS X, creates 'virtual machines', which act as independent computers, even though they are really big programs. You can then load a 'guest' operating system into each VM.

Boot Camp enables you to create a separate partition, on which you install Windows. Originally, to use this Windows installation, you had to shut down OS X and reboot the machine and start Windows instead.

But WMWare can 'pick up' the Windows installation from its separate partition and run it inside a VM. In this case, you don't install Windows inside the VM. Nusku08, this is precisely what you described. Your installation of Windows is already on a seprate partition. You can re-install OS X without touching Windows. Then, you will only need to re-install VMware and point it at the Windows partition.

You'll still need to install the Apple hardware drivers on the Windows partition to be able to use your Apple hardware, and you'll need to install the VMWare Tools on it to have it work well inside the VMWare virtual machine.

[Nusku08]

many thanks for both replies - I'm starting to better understand how it works.

Fusion really seems to work very well indeed !

[edesignuk]

VMware virtual machines are entirely self contained. By default they installed to ~/Documents/Virtual Machines. All you need to do is copy the file for your VM to and external drive or DVD, then you can simply copy it back once you've reinstalled Leopard and VMware.

[Nusku08]

Cool !