More or less I now have my new 64 bit notebook using VMWare to create environments that I want. Working with the new version 6 WMWare shows the work VMWare has put into the latest release. Had I understood all of its features I could have saved myself time and hassle.

   I created several time the base Vista VM each with a larged virtual disk because I ran out of space with each crop of application that I needed to install. First, a 14 GB disk was too small, then a 20 GB disk was too small and eventually I needed a 24 GB disk. Getting to 24 GB was the interesting part.

   After several tries at creating a VM the right size, my last attempt was at 20 GB which I thought was surely enough only to find out that I ran out of room. How could this be I thought to myself, 20 GB for Vista, Visual Studio 2005, documentation and some tools. Worse, I didn't even have all the tools installed when I ran out of room. The thought of recreating the VM and installing all the apps from scratch was almost unthinkable. This is when I decided to read the manual!

   In the PDF manual, I discovered ya section that told how to expand the virtual disk. "They finally did it!", I thought. In version 5 there was illusion to being able to expand the disk but it didn't materialize. The manual for version 5 was very clear, that the disk sized selected at the outset was the disk size. You could shrink it but you couldn't expand it.

   The manual for version 6 said to use the command line utility vmware-vdiskmanager could enlarge a VM disk. So I ran it and found that VMWare reported that the disk (originally 20 GB) was now 24 GB. Great, I thought. But when I started the VM the disk was reported at just 20GB. After some thinking I realized that VMWare did enlarge the disk, but the Vista formated space was still  20GB. Using the Vista Disk Management applet, I allocated the new 4 GB to the existing 20 GB and I had 24 GB of usable space. It really worked!