Lastly we had created our first virtual machine. We had provided some configuration options while creating that machine. Mostly that would work for our purpose, but if someone want to tweak some configuration items, then this would help him do whatever he needs to change.
That machine is now listed on your virtual server main page. You can see this machines settings and configure it further, to do that, click on “Virtual Machines” > Configure > WIN2K3 menu item on the left sidebar.
You can also edit configuration, from main status window, by pointing at the machine name, which will popup a menu, choose “Edit Configuration” from it. Both would take you to the following screen. This screen list basic status, and different configuration options available.
The configuration sections provides links for following settings:
- General properties
- Virtual Machine Additions
- Memory
- Hard disks
- CD / DVD
- SCSI adapters
- Network adapters
- Scripts
- Floppy drive
- COM ports
- LPT ports
We will be focusing ourselves to some of them, others are not so much important for us. When you click on “General properties” link, you will see the following settings screen. Here you can change the name of your machine, specify hardware assisted virtualization, keep some notes, and most importantly how should that machine behave when virtual server goes down when this machine is running. You can either save the state of that machine, turn it off, or shutdown the guest operating system.
By the way, in virtualization, there are two type of operating systems.
- HOST – the operating system running on the physical hardware.
- GUEST – the operating system running on the virtual machines.
If you like to change the RAM used by this machine, then click on “Memory” configuration option and change the value there. 
Another important configuration item is your existing virtual hard disk settings, and adding extra hard disks. For this you will have to go to the “Hard disks” section. Just as in actual machines, we can attach hard disks to specific channels (or cables), here you have the same type of options as attachments. Secondly every known hard disk is listed in second dropdown.
Virtual server enumerates all .vhd files from configured paths, which we had already specified in Setting configuration and search paths. Secondly virtual server uses fully qualified paths, and does not work with relative paths. So keeping things in mind, we can add, or create new hard disks, which will be attached with our machine.
Next we can specify “CD / DVD”, this is an important configuration too. As we will have to install operating system and other related software on our machine. We could either burn our application installers on CD or we can create .iso images and mount them in our CD. We also need to specify channel on which to attach this drive.
The next item on our list is how we will be connecting all machines together. As I want to test SharePoint in this environment, so I will want to create a network of virtual machines. That would force me to choose “Internal Network” option for all my machines. If later on need to connect any machine with host system then I will add another network to that machine, which will provide access point to that network from my host machine.
Default options are good enough mostly, but I took the liberty to just explain some configuration items, and how they will effect our machine’s working.