The School is a member of the VMWare Academic Program – VMAP – which provides Maths & Physics staff and students with access to a range of VMWare software at no cost.

If you would like access to the VMAP storefront, email mp.support@qub.ac.uk with your details, and an account will be set up for you. You will get an email from e5.onthehub.net with a login link; your username will be your QUB email address, and you can use the ‘forgot password’ option to set a password. The account is valid for a year – it will need to be revalidated after that.

Once logged on to the VMAP storefront you can ‘buy’ a zero cost copy of the relevant VMWare product – VMWare Fusion for macOS, VMWare Workstation for Windows/Linux. You will be provided with a download link for the installer, and a serial number to activate the package. You can always access the serial number from your account history if you lose it.

Once you have installed VMWare you will need to create a virtual machine. This must use a properly licensed operating system. For Linux VMs this is simple – just download the relevant ISO for your preferred distro and use the new VM setup wizard. For Windows VMs we can provide you with a pre-configured VM image which uses the University licensed Windows 10 Enterprise.

You should be aware that VM images are large and use a lot of disk space – the Windows 10 image starts around 20GB and only gets larger. You will probably want to exclude the directory the image is stored in from your regular backup solution (eg. Time Machine) or OneDrive as they simply don’t deal well with large files which are constantly changing.