This guide describes how to take a SolarNode disk image and convert that into a VMWare virtual machine disk that can be used to boot up a node as a virtual machine. This can be useful for testing out a node without any physical node hardware.

The ebox SolarNode images are i386 Debian based disk images that can run in a VMWare virtual machine. Download the latest image and copy the image to a USB stick or SD card as described on the download page.

VMWare comes with the utility vmware-rawdiskCreator which can create a virtual disk configuration out of a physical disk. With the USB stick or SD card still attached (but make sure the partition is not mounted by your host OS) run this utility like this:

vmware-rawdiskCreator create /dev/disk4 1 SolarNode-USB ide

That will create an IDE based virtual disk out of the /dev/disk4 device, partition 1 named SolarNode-USB.vmdk. Note this virtual disk will still read/write from/to the USB stick/SD card.

You can turn the USB/SD-backed disk into a regular file-backed virtual disk using the vmware-vdiskmanager utility. Run it like this:

vmware-vdiskmanager -r SolarNode-USB.vmdk -t 0 SolarNode.vmdk

This will create a new SolarNode.vmdk virtual disk as a single file, copied from the USB stick/SD card.

Note that the VMWare virtual machine setup wizard may offer to use an existing disk image, and even to copy it into a new one for you. In that case you could simply refer to the SolarNode-USB.vmdk image when creating the virtual machine, discussed in the next section.

Now you can create a new virtual machine in VMWare. If asked, create one for i386 Debian Linux. Configure the SolarNode.vmdk virtual disk as the only IDE hard disk for the machine.