VMware Fusion – All About the Bundles

by bunchc on January 11, 2010

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:

No Files

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””

Show Package Contents

Like that. Once done, you are presented the following:

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.

Tagged as: Fusion, VMware

  • http://blog.scottlowe.org/ Scott Lowe

    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.

  • http://professionalvmware.com professionalvmware

    Indeed. Also found this usefu in explaining bundles: http://www.mactipsandtricks.com/articles/Wiley_…

  • http://www.geekandi.com/ Mike Horwath

    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.

  • Pingback: virtualizationtimes.com

  • command_tab

    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…

Previous post:

Next post: