It's always nice to try out new things, for instance Windows 7. If not for any other reason than to see what the fuzz is about.

But trying a new operating system usually means that you need a computer to install it on. Trouble is that you usually don't have any spare computers lying around.

This is when you need a virtual machine, and EasyVMX is here to help you. Provided you have installed VMware Player and you have downloaded the ISO with Windows 7, you are now just a few steps away from installing Windows 7.

First, go to the Super Simple virtual machine creator. Now follow these steps:

• Fill in a name for your new virtual machine.
• Select "Windows Vista" from the list of operating systems.
• Assign some memory to the virtual machine. 1024MB would be nice, if you can spare it.
• Windows 7 needs about 5GB of disk for the install. Choose maybe 10GB, or more if you need it.
• Enter the name of the ISO file you have downloaded, and check the "Enable" box.
• Click "Create Virtual Machine", and download your freshly created virtual machine. (And give a donation, if you think I deserve it.)

You are now left with a zip-file. Extract it to a place of your liking, and move the Windows 7 ISO file into the same folder.

Double click on the file that ends with .vmx. VMware Player will start, and begin installing Windows 7. That's all there's to it!

Remember, this will work for any operating system. All you have to do is change the field "Virtual Machine Operating System" accordingly.

One year ago, almost on the day, we reached the half million mark.

Today, we have passed the million. That's right, there are now more than one million virtual machines created by EasyVMX out there!

Thanks to everybody using this service.

An extra special thank you goes to those of you who have donated and kept this site alive. I couldn't have done it without you!

Every now and then, people decide it's time to do some tinkering with virtual machines. And then they figure it's a good idea to share the experience.

embeddedman.com did just that with the article Creating Virtual Machines — EmbeddedMan Style. Check it out, it's a good read.

I recently received an email from a guy who has done a very nice tutorial on how to use VMware Player. His tutorial includes a section on EasyVMX. It's clearly written and easy to understand, so I decided to share it here on the blog.

His article is called Using VMware Player to Create Images for New Virtual Machines.

I'm sure a lot of people will be happy to know that VMware 2.0 is finally released.

This major release introduces VI Web Access, VMware remote console, USB 2.0 device support, increased RAM support (8GB instead of 3.6GB per virtual machine), improved 64-bit guest support, native 64-bit host support on Linux, quiesced backups of virtual machines, a VMCI Sockets interface, and hot add and remove for SCSI hard disks.

You can get VMware Server 2.0 from VMware.com.

VMware Player just got upgraded to version 2.5.

This release introduces Unity View (integrating guest applications with the host), an installer bundle for Linux hosts providing a graphical UI wizard, and accelerated 3D graphics (DirectX 9 accelerated graphics with shaders up through Shader Model 2.0) on Windows XP guests. Operating system support was expanded. Several other enhancements and performance improvements were made.

Go to the VMware Player page to download the latest version.

If you prefer to play around with pre-configured virtual machines, you can get as many as you want from the VMware Virtual Appliance Marketplace.

The standards body IEEE has a list of something that's called OUI. If this is a new TLA (Three Letter Acronym) for you, it expands to Organizational Unique Identifier.

An OUI is actually one or more ranges of MAC adresses assigned to an organization that's issuing network cards (real or virtual).

And wouldn't you know, XenSource, recently acquired by Citrix, has it's own OUI.

This prompted a new release of EasyMAC, the MAC address generator.

The new features are:

• Generation of valid XenSource MAC addresses.
• A new option to output only the MAC address, without any extra text.

Head over to the download page for more info and downloads.

Today, Monday, February 11, 2008, virtual machine number 500.000 was created by EasyVMX!

I can safely say that this never happened before. Now, join me on the quest for the first million!

Happy new year to everybody!

Frustrated by the fact that I'm trying to kick the habit of using moist snuff (or in Swedish, snus), I have done a small design tweak.

The inside of the Virtual Machine Creators (EasyVMX!, SuperSimple and v2.0) has never really looked very well. This is an attempt to make it look a little better.

The two pictures above show the change from worse to better.

(By the way, if you're wondering... The snus quitting is not a new year's resolution, it's just taken more time than I thought it would. :( )