Some might wonder what a virtual machine is? It is an emulation of real world computer, which emulates complete hardware system, from process to network card, in a self-contained, isolated software environment. Virtual machine facilitates in running different operating system on a host system.

After installing Virtual Server, it’s time to create a new machine to play with. Open Virtual Sever Administration Website in your browser, you will see your server’s status screen, and list of recent events, which you can see below.

You can see the left sidebar, main navigation for the administration website. On this sidebar, second section belongs to virtual machine. You can see two options at this moment, one for creating a new virtual machine, and second for adding any existing machines.

Till now we don’t have any machines, so click on “Create” option, which will take you to the machine creation screen.

You can see different options on this screen. First of all specify a unique name for this machine, Virtual Server will automatically create the required folders in configured paths. Specify the memory allocation for this machine, which all depends on your host system configuration. If you have adequate memory, allocate more, but for my purpose I will be using 128MB only, as it would be enough for most of my machines. However I will change it for my SharePoint machine, and allocate it a bit more than others.

Next most important items on this screen is the Virtual hard disk. You have three options here, either create a new disk, use an existing or choose your disk later, but without hard disk, I don’t think you will be able to start your machine.

We would be creating disk for this machine right now, that way both Virtual Machine Configuration (.vmc) and Virtual Hard Disk (.vhd) files would be placed at one location. Which will help us re-create virtual machines from this basic configuration by just copying it.

By the way I will give more details about different types of virtual hard disks later in another post.