Along with the last Fusion related post, this post also takes a slight tangent from our normal ESX/vSphere centric coverage to document something for myself that others may indeed also find useful.
Setting the story: Thanks to some awesome folks at work, I recently acquired a MacBook Pro with VMware Fusion installed. While awesome (Both the MacBook and Fusion (And the folks at work)), I was keying up an ESXi post for the blog, and found myself looking for the files that made up the ESXi VM. Looking in “Finder” I was a bit lost:
Where were all the files? No VMX, no VMDK… what gives. A quick search turned up this communities post, which boils down to: “Right (Ctrl) click the “vmwarevm” file, and select “Show Package Contents””
Like that. Once done, you are presented the following:
![ProVMware_-_ESXi.vmwarevm-20100111-094458[1]](https://vbrownbag.comm/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/ProVMware__ESXi.vmwarevm201001110944581.jpg "ProVMware_-_ESXi.vmwarevm-20100111-094458[1]")
There are actually plenty more files than that, the screenshot is truncated for space. Seemingly VMware Fusion uses a concept called “Bundles” to capture all the files in one location. Bundles are essentially a way of saying “all of these things belong together.
Bundles are actually a Mac OS X-thing, not necessarily a VMware Fusion thing. Bundles are how Mac OS X groups applications together (if you right-click/Control-click an application in your Applications folder, you'll see the Show Package Contents option there as well) as well as a whole plethora of other files. It's pretty handy, actually…it helps to cut down on various versions of files being scattered all over the hard drive.
The concept of bundles is not a Fusion related item at all but a way that Mac OS X has allowed developers to group their data together for a long time.
In fact, if you head to /Applications, you'll be able to do the same thing, right click, show package contents, and you can see how an application is 'bundled' as well.
Indeed. Also found this usefu in explaining bundles: http://www.mactipsandtricks.com/articles/Wiley_…
Bundles are a well-used feature of Mac OS X. Developers can choose to register a file extension, in this case, “.vmwarevm”, to be a bundle and act as a single file instead of a folder of files. I imagine the thinking is that developers can choose to hide some of the complexity of applications by packing up a handful of files into a single unit. Mac OS X applications, among many other things, are also bundles. (It should be noted that other OSes don't understand bundles, and simply see a folder full of files, so it's not the sort of thing you can upload via a web form.) It is pretty cool, though, to be able to bust open an application or saved-document bundle and see all the things that make it up.
More here:
http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/document…