Although I do not intend to run VMWare directly on a physical partition containing Windows any time soon, a recent discussion on a greek linux users group about the implications of such an experiment made me write a post about an article I stumbled upon today. The article author notes:

VMWare is an incredibly useful piece of software. Problem is, it feels like it’s perched on the tip of an eggshell. Any change to its environment tends to cause it to fall over, isolating all your data in the VM until you can find the time to get it working again. It’s not fun to trust important data to such a brittle environment.

Apart from the concern about the stability of the environment that hosts the guest operating system I can think of 1 or 2 more reasons why someone would want to run VMWare on a pre-existing installation of Windows on a physical volume. The first would be “convenience” and the other would be just “fun“.

Howto: Run VMWare on a Physical Windows Partition by George Notaras is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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