Home Lab (VMWare Settings – continued)

You may want to be able to access resources that are available from a USB connected external hard drive or flash memory device. USB connected devices will not be available to the virtual machine unless the Virtual Machine (VM) Settings have the USB Controller loaded. If the USB Controller is not loaded in the VM settings, you can add the controller by clicking the Add button. Clicking the Add button will load the Add Hardware wizard in which you will notice device drivers that can be loaded for your virtual machine. When the USB controller is loaded, the virtual machine will automatically detect the insertion of a USB device and mount that device to the virtual machine OS. This can be problematic when you’re trying to copy files between the flash key and the host OS. The USB controller can be disconnected from the virtual machine and you can change the default USB Connections in the VM Settings. The last topic for the VM Settings is the processor settings. Most VM settings that I have seen only have one processor selected from the processor settings. If the hardware of your PC is an Intel Duo based processor, the physical processor has 2 CPU cores. I change this setting on my machine to two to maximize processor utilization. We’re done with the virtual machine settings. Click the OK button to commit your VM settings. It’s time to start your virtual machine. Click “Start this virtual machine” under the Commands section of VMWare. Alternatively, you can select the universal play icon from the tool bar. If the virtual machine you are running is Windows based, you will need to install the virtual machine tools to the virtual machine operating system after it is loaded. This will allow the virtual machine Operating System to detect the host operating system hardware resources as devices available to the virtual machine. After installing the VMWare tools, the Network Interface Card (NIC) should become available in the virtual machine. If you have inherited a virtual machine from someone else, the VMWare tools may be loaded, but they may be outdated. A message to this effect will appear in the lower right hand portion of VMWare. At the time of this writing, I have not needed to use the virtual machine tools on any of the Linux based version of Call Manager / Cisco Unified Communications Manager. A few people have asked me to cover some router hardware recommendations for a home lab. The next blog entry will head in that direction.