I followed one of the howto's to install vmare on debian 4. I can connect to the vmware server from my windows xp box using the vmware server console just fine. I have created a virtual machine named ispconfig which is now ready for a new OS. I downloaded the ispconfig virtual appliance. It is a zip file with 4 or 5 files in it and is approximately 694mb. So what do I have to do now to get this zip from my xp box to the vmware server... burn it to a cd? then what?
The file you have downloaded is a VMWare image, not a CD ISO. As long as the new virtual machine you have created matches the ISPConfig appliance image virtual hardware requirements e.g. SCSI disk rather than ide etc. you simply copy the files from the downloaded zip into the folder created for the new virtual machine, and start it. VMWare will mutter a bit and ask about identifiers and similar. Just answer yes and the system will start. I think the correct procedure is to import the files via the console, but this is not possible from a remote console connection.
There is a howto that explains how to import / start a vmware image: http://www.howtoforge.com/import_vmware_images
Got to set the hooks first... Be aware that the appliance from VMWare is over a year old, and uses Debian 3.1, not 4. There is also the small matter of the German keyboard layout that can be quite fun. kbdconfig is a good idea. Sorting out the IP addresses is also interesting, and above all, do not run an apt-get update or upgrade, without first editing the /etc/apt/sources.list file and changing 'stable' to 'sarge', 'testing' to 'etch' and probably a couple of others.
