Access to Your Host PC's Resources
When running your guest OS in a virtual appliance, your guest OS gets access to the host PC's CD/DVD drives, USB devices, and network connections. The virtual network adapters of VMware Player can be connected in one of two ways:
- The network adapter driver can use the network address translation (NAT) through the host machine.
- The virtual network adapter can bridge through the host machine. Bridging requires an IP address for each guest machine on your host network.
You can also adjust the amount of RAM dedicated to the VM.
Mounting Drives
VMware Workstation (but not VMware Player) allows you to simulate hardware. For example, you can emulate a CD-ROM/DVD-ROM by mounting an ISO file. Similarly, .vmdk files can be mounted as hard disks.
Drag and Drop
If your host PC is running Windows and your guest VM is also running Windows, then VMware Player allows you to move files between your Windows host machine and a Windows virtual machine. This can be done easily by dragging and dropping individual files or entire directories from the host PC to the guest virtual machine's VMware application window and vice versa.
Not Just VMware Images
One of the remarkable traits of VMware Player is its ability to play not only VMware images but also the VMs of Microsoft Virtual PC and Symantec LiveState Recovery.