Note : I am running a french version of Windows so the screenshots may show some french labels.
Now that you’ve got your VMware server running, let’s prepare it to install CentOS 5. This is my favorite free Linux distribution because it’s derived from RedHat’s Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Therefore, it is really easy to find packages and documentation.
Start by launching the VMware Server Console and select Local Host.
Click on New Virtual Machine from the main screen and select the Typical machine configuration. When asked about the guest operating system, select Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 as CentOS is not available.
Now enter your virtual machine’s name (this is just for the purpose of managing your virtual machines and will not appear anywhere in the OS’ configuration). You must also specify where the virtual disks will reside. Please note that having a dedicated partition or better, a dedicated hard drive, to store the virtual drives may increase performance significantly.
Select the type of network connection that will be made available for your virtual machine.
For my part, I use « Bridge Networking » as my virtual machine will have an IP address on the external network because I want it to be accessible to my LAN. If you want your virtual machine to be accessible only from your host, you can use « Host Only Networking ».
Now for the virtual hard drive, specify how much space is needed.
Don’t worry about disk space as you will be able to increase later if needed. Make sure you check « Allocate all disk space now » otherwise the file’s size will increased as it’s needed and performance will be affected. You could also choose to split the virtual disk into 2 GB files if more performance is needed.
Setting Up A Virtual Linux Web Server Part 3 : Installing CentOS 5
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