VMware Fusion: Is there a way to create new VMs in alternate locations

Question

I've been using VMware Fusion and keeping my VMs on an external firewire drive. The problem is, whenever I create a new VM, it insists on creating it on my main drive and I can then move it over to the external drive.

With VMware WorkStation, you could configure a directory for new VMs, but I don't see anything like that for Fusion. Is there an option like that?

Answer 1

As per this article VMWare Fusion will prompt you were to save the Virtual Machine during creation. If I recall in VMWare Fusion 2.0 you could specify this under preferences.

Answer 2

THere is a Customize Settings option on the Finish step of the New Machine creation wizard. From there you can specify where you want the VM to reside.

Answer 3

This is not technically an answer...

I recommend creating all virtual machines in /Users/Shared and then applying permissions to the individual folders (i.e. the individual VMs). This has several advantages:

1. VMs don't take up room in the home directory.

2. /Users/Shared can be excluded from Time Machine since VMs shouldn't be backed up using Time Machine anyway.

3. VMs can easily be shared between users on the same Mac. Just create a group for VM users and change the group of the VMs to that group to assign permissions.

4. It's a clean solution.

Better yet, use a second hard disk for VMs if you can.

I have three VMs (Vista 64, XP 32, SuSE Linux 64) and they are all located on the second internal hard disk which isn't being backed up by Time Machine either.