Changes

The preceding section of this chapter described the VMware Server 2.0 installation process using the graphical wizard. As previously mentioned, the wizard installs all networking options by default. For greater control over this aspect of the installation, it is necessary to resort to installating VMware Server from the command prompt. Before proceeding with the steps in this section, however, it is important to note that the installation process will perform an automatic and unprompted restart of the operating system once the installation is complete. For this reason, it is important to save all work and exit any running applications before beginning a command line based VMware Server installation.

The first step of this process is to unpack the installation image to a temporary location (for example ''C:\tmp\vmware''). This is achieved using the following command line:

VMware-server-2.x.x-xxxxxx.exe /a /s /v TARGETDIR="C:\tmp\vmware" /qn

In the above syntax outline, the command line arguments in square brackets are optional and ''TempPath'' is the temporary location into which the installation files were extracted in the preceding step (C:\tmp\vmware in the case of this example). If VMware Server is to be installed in a location other than the default (\Program Files\VMware\VMware Server), specify the desired alternate location using the ''INSTALLDIR='' directive.

The optional ''property="value" directives allows allow options such as the serial number and whether a desktop shortcut should be created to be passed through to the installer. For example, the following command passes through the serial number and requests a desktop shortcut for access to the VI Web Access interface: