1) Set your VMware drive to 16 GB as it needs at least 15 GB to meet minimum requirements.

2) Give it some decent RAM if you have it, I’m running mine at 384mb of RAM. In a test environment, I’d often rather have a few slow machines than one quick one so balance the RAM you have to play with based on your own needs.

3) “Load Driver: A required CD/DVD drive device driver is missing. If you have a driver floppy disk, CD, DVD or USB flash drive, please insert it now. Note: If the Windows installation media is in the CD/DVD drive, you can safely remove it for this step.”

To fix the above situation, many suggested using a physical CD. If you are working with VMware server and don’t have a DVD in your server, this can become a bigger problem. Luckily there are other tools out there to help you mount ISO files as physical drives outside of the VMware feature provided internally. One such tool is Daemon Tools 4.08 and it did the trick for me. Note: Version 4.03 did not allow me to see it in VMware server from my client console.

4) Another frustrating problem I ran up against was having the installation hang at the initial command window with the message “Windows is loading files…”. The progress bar goes to 100% and then sits there indefinitely. As it turns out, this is a video resolution issue which can be overcome by opening your VMX file in notepad and adding the following two lines to the bottom of the text:

svga.maxWidth = "640" svga.maxHeight = "480"

5) Once you get up and running, install VMware Tools. On some machines I had to reboot to see the ISO image that is mapped by VMware for this purpose and in all cases I had to run setup manually from File Explorer (autorun never kicked it off). I chose the “Complete” option to make sure I had all the drivers and support files I might need. Note that while the issue is not limited to working in Vista, in order to keep the VMware Tools installation from pausing, I found the need to keep focus in the virtual machine with the setup wizard as the active window.

6) Once VMware tools are installed, you can shut down the virtual machine and remove the resolution limiting text entries mentioned earlier.

7) Once setup was complete, I found there was no network connectivity. To resolve this, shut down and edit the options of the network card in Virtual Machine Settings to change the adapter type from vlance to vmxnet.

Now that Vista is becoming more prevalent, there is a good deal of information floating around on dealing with these types of problems—this is just what I saw and hopefully it can save you some of the headaches I encountered working with earlier beta releases of Vista.