I'm loving VMWARE on windows, and I have a wonderful WMWARE image that simply allows you to "boot" any livecd iso inside the WMWARE virtual machine.

Anyway, is it possible to mirror a VMWARE machine image to a real hard drive?
Thus I could configure my linux system within the comfort of a window inside Windows and then when I've got it as I like it (say as a special purpose appliance type system or something), I could just mirror it onto a REAL hard drive and stick it in a dedicated REAL computer and let it do its thing.

I've just started researching VMWare so I can't quite answer your question.

From what I've read so far it looks like it should be no problem to put an OS image on the hard disk be it an image of XP or Linux. Additionally, you can apparently run VMWare on XP or Linux. I see this as an answer to a friends question of what to do when his XP system inevitably gets whacked and has to spend the better part of a day re-loading XP and all the OEM dirvers and special software he uses.

The documentation for VMWare should tell you how to do this and I will probably have to go there myself to answer my own questions

My question is: Why not have VMWare run on linux which is inherently more stable and secure and save the base XP load to the HD for retrieval when it gets whacked? You are probably more comfortable with XP as the base OS though and probably should stick with that.

but then, what do I know? I'm just getting involved with VMWare myself.