This blog post is Part 1 in the Active Directory on Windows Server 2019 Series of knowledge articles

Zulfikar Ali, 2023

It is time to create your first Virtual Machine (VM) now that you have VMware Workstation installed. A few things to note before you begin:

Ensure you have enough RAM

Ensure you have enough RAM on your device, as a rough guide you need at least 1GB (1024MB) for Windows 10 or 11 and you will need at least 2GB (2048MB) for Windows Server 2016, 2019 or 2022. For Linux the RAM requirement varies on the Linux distribution you plan to use – 1GB is usually enough, but check the OS guide online to be sure.

Then multiply the minimum amount of RAM with how many VMs you might have running at the same time, this will give you a rough idea of how much RAM in total you will need, here’s an example:

Ensure you have enough free Disk Space

Once you know you have enough RAM the next challenge is how much free disk space you have on your laptop.

Windows 10, 11, Server 2016/2019/2022 – these will need a minimim of 30GB. You will need allocate this to the primary virtual hard disk (the C: drive) when you create a new VM. However if you plan to install additional software and services on your VM you will need much more space, even Windows updates for your VM will start to use up the free space available pretty quickly.

We recommend a minimum of 30GB for the hard disk for Windows VMs, but we prefer if you can allocate 50GB. This will give you an overhead for your VM without having to manually extend the virtual disk in the future.

NOTE: VMware workstation will only use the disk space requested by the operating system. If you allocate a 30GB virtual disk but the Windows installation consumes 15GB then only 15GB of disk space will be used from your laptop itself!

My Laptop does not have enough disk space

You have 2 choices here:

1. Use an external drive with your laptop via the USB drive. You can buy a SSD disk drive (around £60 for for a 1TB Samsung SSD in December 2023) and then just buy a cheap enclosure (around £6.99 of Amazon) to house it in. Click here for an example. Then simply store your VMs on this external drive connected via USB 3.0. Remember your VMs won’t work if the USB drive is not connected!
2. Ugrade the RAM on your laptop if it is possible to do so. Depending on your laptop you may be able to upgrade the RAM yourself, if so use the Crucial RAM advisor to find compatible RAM but check online prices before you buy as you might find it cheaper elsewhere. Also be careful to check the maximum amount of RAM your laptop can support, don’t buy more than this and check you have enough RAM slots to use!

Time to create that first VM

Launch VMware Workstation Pro 17 if not already started

Click ‘Create a New Virtual Machine’

Choose Custom, click Next>

On Hardware Compatibility leave it on ‘Workstation 17.5.x’ unless you know you will need to support VMs created in an earlier version of VMware Workstation with your nee installation. Click Next>

Now select the Operating System (OS) you will be using with this VM. You have an extensive list to choose from, if the one you want is not there just the closest one – it usually works. For our Lab it is a Windows Server 2019 we are creating . Click Next>

Now create a unique name for your new VM, it has to unique on your home network. Use something descriptive so you have some idea of what it it.

‘Location’ is where the files that make up the VM (.vmx, .vmdk etc) are saved and I like to keep my stuff under a central ‘Data’ directory and in their a folder called VMs. Under that I create a folder with the same name I chose for the VM itself – this keeps all this VMs files in one place. I recommend you have a similar approach, putting VMs directly under C:\VMs\ is also OK. Choose your VM name and location, click Next>

For Firmware Type choose BIOS and click Next>

Next>

More stuff here

On the next post in this series we will add the second hard disk to Windows. Then create our first Domain Controller.