Becky, I am just wondering what version of VMWare you are running here.  VM Ware Workstation 7?  Also, I have been looking at new laptops as well.  Just wondering if you looked at the Lenovo ThinkPad W700?

Hi Becky, I am assuming you are trying to set up a new SP 2010 VM? If yes, would you mind sharing it with us once you're done?

God Bless
Steve

Craig,
I am indeed using VMWare Workstation 7. VM Ware generously offered me a license for their product so I could evaluate it. Having been a pretty dyed-in-the-wool Virtual PC user for years, it's a transition to learn how to use a new product. I can't say it's been particularly easy so far, but it's hard to tell how much of the issues have been my lack of experience, and how much has been the fact that I'm running it on unusal hardware (quad core laptop processor, 8 GB RAM) and a new OS (Windows 7).

I did look at the Lenovo ThinkPad. I think, quite honestly, ThinkPads are better machines. However, for the hundreds of dollars in price difference, it was hard for me to justify the cost. That being said, my monitor has gone out on me three times in the last week for no reason, which is making me wonder if I made the right decision. Other than that, though, I LOVE the speed of this HP. It can copy files at a rate of about a GB a minute, which is incredibly helpful if you're moving virtual machines around. That alone is literally saving me hours of time.

Becky,

I just re-read my comments before and it didn't come out well. What I meant was - once you've finished setting up the VM - would you mind sharing with us the steps on how to build one ourselves?

Thanks
Steve

Steve, thanks for the comment! There are actually a number of good articles out there about how to configure a SharePoint 2010 environment. (Doing it on a virtual machine or on a physical server is pretty much identical.) Take a look at these posts:

http://blogs.msdn.com/opal/archive/2009/11/16/installation-notice-for-sharepoint-2010-public-beta.aspx
http://www.alpesh.nakars.com/blog/sharepoint-2010-installation/

I received the same error while installing the infrasturcture update. My laptop has 6 gb of ram and I set aside 2gb for the VM.  The error went away when reducing the reserved ram to 1gb.

if you get this error:
--------------------------------------
Operation on file "D:\xxxx\yyyyyy.vmdk" failed.
If the file resides on a remote file system, please make sure your network connection and the server where this disk resides are functioning properly. If the file resides on removable media, reattach the media.
Choose Retry to attempt the operation again.
Choose Abort to terminate this session.
Choose Continue to forward the error to the guest operating system.
--------------------------------------------
reduce memory way down.
Thanks to this site. Error message is poor and does not indicate real problem and memory configurations that vmware suggest, seem not to be correct.
Vmware workstation, windows 7 host, xp guest

Becky, I am trying to figure out what your complaint is. From what I can tell VMWare is suggesting that you keep your VMAllocated memory footprint to the amount that will keep the host OS and the VM both in RAM (7264M = 8G-768M) If you push the VM to larger than 7264M it will be forced to put some of the VM into swap. It is telling you that the most swap you have is 32G (4x your physical RAM) if you want more, try adjusting your swap settings on the Host OS, but the rule of thumb I learned decades ago was swap shouldn't be greater than twice the RAM.

Hi Becky,

Did you manage to work around this problem ?
I have the same problem with HP Envy and VMware..
3 GBs are not enough and that's why I got this Envy!