How to save VMware Fusion VM's?

Question

I'm working on making 3 VM versions of XP with IE6, 7, and 8 separately for my team. I started with an old VMware image we had that had IE6 and SP2 and have gone through and have customized it with everything we need, leaving IE6.

Now I need to duplicate this VM and subsequently update to IE7 and 8 on the next 2 copies.

My original VM had the files: .nvram, .vmdk, .vmsd, .vmx, and .vmxf. When I created the new vm from this, I had to choose the .vmdk file. VMware then went through and built out the other files it needed.

I'm finding that all of the updates I did on my first copy of XP are stored in a separate file that I directed VMware to store in /usr/local/vms. With the updates and 2 snapshots I took during the upgrade process, its about 6gb now.

I duplicated my original VM and setup a new machine called IE7, but when it booted none of the updates were there. So I'm knowing now that all of my changes were kept in the /usr/local/vms/IE6 6gb file.

How can I merge all of my updates back into the .vmdk file so that I can A) Create the other 2 IE7/8 VMs I need and B) place the 3 vm images on our network for our other developers to utilize?

My thinking is that since I started this process from a .vmdk file, there should be a way to push everything back into that.

Answer 1

Deleting the snapshot point should commit the delta files back into the main .vmdk file. You should be able to snapshot before the browser install, and fork each install after the snapshot.

If these are to be reference copies for testing, I would use the cloning/copy function to create separate virtual machines, one for each browser. This might be easier to maintain and distribute to other users.