Moving a vmware player driven virtual machine between local discs

Sometimes, simple things seem to become complicated by the multitude of options being available on how to actually execute them. This was the case for me lately when i tried to just move a vm from some location on my local discs to another. This vm runs in a vmware player 4.0.1 and remembering the steps i executed during installation, that is, copy the source files (some appliance of redmine on suse, great stuff, really, see http://bitnami.org/stack/redmine) to some location and then opening them in the player, i decided to evenly do another copy as well as another open.

However, although the copy vm booted nicely, it somehow lost its network settings such that eth0 failed to come up. At a first glance, i supposed that having two vm’s of the same environment (excluding the disk location) might puzzle vmware player such that i shutdown the copy vm, renamed the original vm disk location and removed the original vm from the vmware player library entry by offer. On retry, i found the same result, eth0 not coming up.

There are other approaches, in fact, but without boring anyone out there to immediate sleep the following steps did work for me eventually:

1. Shutdown this running vm (environment) cleanly
2. Close vmware player (iff not self-closed)
3. Copy, don’t move for backup reasons, this vm top directory (usually the vm name) to the new location
4. Start vmware player again
5. Open the settings of this vm, go to the options tab and change the general setting called working directory to point to the new location
6. Close the settings of this vm by save
7. Launch this vm as usual

have fun!