Creating an empty virtual machine

Once you have downloaded the software packages, you need to configure your virtual machine. Once ready, we will create our empty virtual machine. We will call our virtual machine SQL2014VM:

1. Launch VMware Player.
2. On the initial screen, click on the Create New Virtual Machine button.
3. You can also do this by navigating to File | Create New Virtual Machine.
4. On the New Virtual Machine Wizard screen, select I will install operating system later. This option will allow you to have more flexibility to configure the operating system later.
5. On the Select a Guest Operating System screen, select Microsoft Windows for the guest operating system, and select Windows Server 2012 from the Version drop-down menu.
6. Choose a name for your virtual machine. We will name our virtual machine SQL2014VM. If you prefer, you can also change the location of your VM:
   
7. We will allocate hard drive space for our virtual machine. In this tutorial, we will allocate 40 GB disk space and choose to...