After you install VMware application, and before you install an operating system in a virtual machine, you must configure the virtual machine. During configuration you specify individual components of the virtual machine, such as drives, memory, and so on. Configuration allows you to easily control which components are added and how they are defined.

Configuring a virtual machine using the VMware application is far simpler than assembling an actual physical computer. And you can quickly and easily configure not just one, but many virtual machines.

Specifically, you identify and provide specifications (or use default values) for the following VM devices and characteristics:

• IDE drives (hard disk or CD-ROM)
• floppy drives (up to two 1.4MB floppies)
• serial port devices (up to four devices)
• parallel port devices (up to two devices)
• ethernet adapter
• mouse
• memory (up to 2GB depending upon actual memory available)
• sound
• miscellaneous specifications such as hot-key and redo log location

You can define a variety of I/O and removable media devices for a VM. VMware maps these devices to the corresponding device of the host operating system and relies on the underlying host operating system to access the underlying device.

A set of configuration parameters is stored in a VM configuration file. Each VM configuration file defines a unique virtual machine. It contains the values for configuration parameters and points to the disks to be used when the VM is started. This file is described in more detail in "Configuration File" .