Selecting a Display Name and Directory for the Virtual Machine

The virtual machine name specified here appears in the Virtual Machine Name list on VMware GSX Server’s opening screen. It is also used as the name of the folder where the files associated with this virtual machine are stored.

Each virtual machine should have its own folder. You can determine the location of this folder. All associated files, such as the configuration file and the disk file, are placed there by the Configuration Wizard.

Virtual machine files include:

The virtual machine configuration file ( .cfg)
The virtual disk file (.vmdk) or raw disk definition files (.raw). The disk files for a virtual disk store the information that you write to a virtual machine's hard disk — the operating system, the program files and the data files. If the virtual disk is larger than 2GB, the directory shows a collection of files whose names are based on the first virtual disk file's name. For example, a Windows Me virtual machine with a 4GB virtual disk would, by default, store that virtual disk in files named WinME.vmdk, WinME-02.vmdk and WinME-03.vmdk.
The BIOS nvram file
The virtual machine log file (.log)
The REDO log used with undoable or nonpersistent disk modes (.REDO) — though the redo log for a disk in nonpersistent mode is stored in your temp directory
The suspend to disk file, which stores the state of a suspended virtual machine (.vmss)

The default virtual machine folder is ~<UserHome>/vmware/ or /home/<UserHome>/vmware/<operating_system_name> where <UserHome> is the currently logged in user's name and <operating_system_name> is the abbreviated name of the guest operating system you are installing. Some of the reasons you may want to use a different folder include lack of space on the default drive or the need to place the virtual machine folder on a file server or on a removable disk.

Warning: Virtual machine performance may suffer if your virtual hard disk is on a network drive. You should be sure that the virtual machine's folder is on a local drive. However, if others users need to access this virtual machine, you should consider placing the virtual machine files in a location that is accessible to them.

Virtual disks can grow to a maximum size of 128 GB for IDE devices or 256GB for SCSI devices, but they start small and do not always consume the maximum space allowed. Therefore it is not necessary to have 128GB (for IDE devices) or 256GB (for SCSI devices) of free space on your drive. It is possible to move the virtual disk file to a different host drive at a later time. If that is done, the path to the virtual disk file must be modified using the Configuration Editor.

If you want to limit the maximum size of a new virtual disk to other than the default size of 4GB, you need to create the virtual machine in Custom mode and enter the maximum size in the Configuration Wizard's Specify Disk Capacity panel. The smallest virtual disk you can create is 0.1GB, or 100MB. The largest virtual disk you can create is 128GB (for IDE virtual disks) or 256GB (for SCSI virtual disks).

Once a virtual disk is created, the maximum size cannot be changed.