There are two problems with VMware installing Windows in ~/Documents:
- Multiple OS X users cannot use the same Windows installation.
- Even one inadvertent omission to exclude ~/Documents from the Time Machine backup means that a heavy penalty will be paid on the TM disk.
How does one install Windows through VMware in a more neutral fashion, perhaps in a separate partition, to make windows accessible by all OS X accounts?
At the risk of getting the two-question police after me, I will venture with a sequel: can one move one's ~/Documents/Virtual Machine.localized/ to a new partition or is it necessary to restart the installation of windows?
Best Answer
You can choose a different location in the "New Virtual Machine Assistant" by clicking "Customize Settings" in the last step of the assistant. Definitely not an intuitive way to go about it.
You can also move an existing VM. To do this, you move the VM to the new location, launch VMWare Fusion, drag the VM from its new location to the "Virtual Machine Library" window, and delete the old VM from the "Virtual Machine Library" (the old one will have a question mark as its preview because it's pointing to the old location).
As @binarybob pointed out in the comments, if the VM is moved to a shared location (e.g. an external HD or /Users/Shared/) then other users will have access to the VM.
Example:
The selected VM will be moved:
After moving the VM in the Finder, VMWare will show the VM as missing:
Drag the moved VM from its new location in the Finder to the "Virtual Machine Library" window:
Delete the old VM (with the question mark as the preview) from the VM Library. This will only delete VMWare's reference to the old location, it won't do anything to the VM itself.
When you open the VM after being moved, VMWare will ask you if you moved or copied it. Because you moved it, choose "I moved it".