HOW TO: Use VMware Player to create your own images
A few months ago, VMware released a free version of its desktop virtualization software, 
VMware Player. It’s a great application for running a second operating system on your desktop; the only problem is you can’t create new virtual images using VMware Player. With a little work, however, you can use VMware Player to create guest operating systems.
The easiest way to get a virtual image is to have someone with VMware Workstation create one for you, or to download a pre-made image from VMware. If you don’t know anyone with a copy of Workstation, or the OS you want isn’t available as a VMware appliance, you’re out of luck. For example, if you want to test a development release of Ubuntu or Debian, it’s unlikely that you’ll find a VMware image available.
If you plan to make extensive use of VMware — i.e., if you need to run more than a single OS, if it’s for your work, or if you’re doing more than just tinkering for fun — go ahead and buy a copy of VMware Workstation. It’s much easier to use VMware Workstation to create virtual machines than to do it manually. Also, Workstation has a number of features you won’t find in VMware Player, such as the ability to take snapshots of the guest OS, take movies of the virtual machine, and use virtual SMP.
But VMware Player will get the job done if you just want to run a virtual host under Linux or Windows. You can also modify your virtual machines for VMware Workstation using the tips here for VMware Player, but you should be able to do most if not all of this through the VMware Workstation GUI. I’ll walk through the process of creating a guest OS on Linux; this should also work under Windows, but you may need to change things such as pathnames. NewsForge | How to use VMware Player to create your own images