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Selecting a Directory for the Virtual Machine

Each virtual machine should have its own directory. You can determine the location of this directory. All associated files, such as the configuration file and the disk file, are placed there by the Configuration Wizard.

Virtual machine files include:

Each virtual machine should reside in a separate directory. The default virtual machine directory is ~<UserHome>/vmware/ or /home/<UserHome>/vmware/ <operating_system_name> where < UserHome> is the currently logged in user's name and <operating_system_name> is the abbreviated name of the guest operating system you are installing. Some of the reasons you may want to use a different directory include lack of space on the default drive or the need to place the virtual machine directory on a file server or on a removable disk.

Warning: Virtual machine performance may suffer if your virtual hard disk is on a network drive. You should be sure that the virtual machine's directory is on a local drive.

Virtual disks can grow to a maximum size of 128 GB for IDE devices or 256GB for SCSI devices, but they start small and do not always consume the maximum space allowed. Therefore it is not necessary to have 128GB (for IDE devices) or 256GB (for SCSI devices) of free space on your drive. It is possible to move the virtual disk file to a different host drive at a later time. If that is done, the path to the virtual disk file must be modified using the Configuration Editor.

If you want to limit the maximum size of a new virtual disk to be less than the default size, enter the maximum size in the Configuration Wizard's 'Specify Disk Capacity' panel. That setting is in megabytes and the default size is 4GB or 4000MB. Once a virtual disk is created, the maximum size cannot be changed.

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