Sharing VMware Experiences

I’ve been a fan of VMware for quite some time now, stretching back years (long before they were sponsoring my video endeavours) - and I’m not alone in my fandom. Gus Munguia is with me:

Hi Chris, I see that you have written a few things about VMware. I have been using VMware products since 1999 when they were in Beta. I would like to share with you what I have done using the free version of VMware (VMware server). One of our PCs got hacked several months ago so I finally decided to do what I a have been thinking about for over a year.

I wiped the PC and installed Windows XP with no TCP/IP protocol. I then installed VMware Server and built a Virtual Windows XP machine and allowed it to get an IP address from the router. This virtual machine connects to the internet and is configured with a non persistent disk, which means that every time that it restarts all changes are lost and it is always in the same state.

I do not need to worry if the virtual machine gets hacked because everything will be lost when I reboot it. Since my real (physical) machine has no ip address and no TCP/IP stack, there is no way for it to get hacked from the internet.

I have been running like this for about 2 months. My virtual machine runs pretty fast because I installed an additional 2 GB of RAM on my physical machine. On the virtual machine I have enabled the Windows firewall and turned off automatic updates. I also do not have any Spyware protection or Anti-virus on the virtual machine since any infection will be lost upon reboot. You would be surprised (or not) on how much faster a machine runs with out Anti-virus or Spyware protection.

Of course there are some issues such as saving IE favorites and loading new software that become a little harder to do with this type of configuration. I have developed procedures for doing these things offline (while not connected to the internet). There are other things that I have done to assure that my physical machine does not communicate with the virtual machine such as disabling the VMware adapters (VMnet1 and VMnet8) and removing other protocols.

There are a few other issues that I have worked around. I currently have 2 physical machines configured like this; one has a wireless network adapter so I had to do some registry manipulation so that it can talk to the access point and not get a valid IP address. I tried putting 127.0.0.1 but the connection was not reliable. I ended up putting in a private IP with a mask of 255.255.255.254 and this has been working so far. I will eventually get rid of the wireless and install CAT 6.

So far this configuration has worked pretty well for me and I hope to eventually have the physical machine run Linux so that I do not have to worry about possible licensing issues with running 2 simultaneous versions of MS Windows on the same machine. I was wondering if you or anybody else has done something similar and would like to share their experiences.

I’m not sure if anybody has answers for Gus, or possibly other ways to use VMware and its line of products?

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