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VMware ACE portable package VM creation How-to

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Published: 30.12.09 - 02:08 CET  |  3 Comments  |  480 views views  | 

VMware ACE – creation an USB pocket package.

With VMware Workstation widely used in the enterprises, there is one cool feature (or product) and this product  does not get much talked about. It’s the ACE product, which is incorporated into VMware Workstation 7 (actually you must have a serial which enables the ACE product inside of VMware Workstation).

Using ACE as disaster recovery solution? – why not… you could use a desktop instances with all the necessary enterprise applications for use in the case of a disaster. These instances can be deployed to portable media devices and stored safely in a secure off site facility. If a disaster occurs, the Pocket ACE instances can be quickly distributed and used.

Pocket ACE lets you store a computing environment on portable devices such as USB keys (flash memory drives), Apple iPod mobile digital devices, and portable hard drives. You can plug the portable device into any x86 PC.

I’ve done a little test at home, just to see how to do the packaging to the USB drive. I’ve tested with 2008 Server, but you can use any other OS as you wish. The only limitation is that the VM installed in your VMware Workstation 7 must have a VMware Tools installed….

First you must enable the ACE features for the Virtual Machine (VM).

Please note that the VM must have the latest VMware tools installed, otherwise the creation of the package will not even start… (I wanted to test and create a pocket ACE package for ESXi 4 but it failed because of that… :-?

Then you click on Create Pocket ACE package.

I leaved default (which is actually a subfolder of your VM’s location, but you can choose another location or network share if you want.

Folowing step – you can assign a password to protect the VM when beeing deployed to the USB drive.

Then the phase of the actual packaging the VM starts. It take some time and you also better have some spare place on your disk drive… FYI, I needed 60 Gigs free space on my USB drive to have my 2008 server being packaged…

At the end you can just power on the packaged VM on any PC with USB slot, where you plug-in your USB drive onto. The package has incorporated the latest version of VMware Player.

Then the VMware Player is installed on your computer. Make sure that you have sufficient privileges to install new programs. Otherwise put yourself to the local administrators group. Enjoy…

Please note that the VM must have the latest VMware tools installed, otherwise the creation of the package will not even start… (I wanted to test and create a pocket ACE package for ESXi 4 but it failed because of that… :-?

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