VMWare is a beautiful piece of software that allows you to run multiple virtual machines on one physical machine. As explained in a previous post, one thing that you can do is create a based virtual machine with one of your favorite operating systems, get all the updates for the operating system, install all your favorite free software, and then just copy and paste or clone the virtual machine to create new virtual machines already setup with all your favorites.
So you are thinking to yourself, that sounds great!! I will create a virtual machine with the base operating system and a small virtual hard drive so I dont take alot of room up on my serve and after I copy it, I will increase the size of the harddrive… Right. Sounds like a good plan and that what I thought. However, not all virtual hard disks are the same. It turns out, the default IDE virtual hard disk does not allow increasing its size on the fly. Therefore, if you are looking to start out with a small virtual hard disk footprint and expand when you need it, it is best to go with the SCSI virtual hard disk. this allows you to increase it storage space on the fly.
Hopefully, you are reading this before you already created your base system with a small IDE hard disk. Unfortunately, I did not and I did not find a way to easily convert the IDE to a SCSI. So I had to start from scratch with a VM machine that was built on a VM SCSI hard drive. Now I am good to go…