How to create a portable virtual machine of Windows 7 Professional with VMware Player

Requirements

1.  A physical Windows system: you can use a virtual machine only if it's compatible with VMware Player but a physical OS is faster, regardless. For these reasons I've used my laptop, running Windows 8.1.
2. An external hard drive (at least 16 GB) to store the virtual machine.
3. VMware player: if you're a current Stark State student, you'll have to use VMware player 5.01, available here. In fact, with newer versions of VMware Player, your virtual machine will not run on the class computers. Anyone else can use the latest version.
4.  A genuine ISO image of Windows 7 Professional: like you may know, this blog doesn't support piracy.  If you're a college student, you can download for free a genuine copy of Windows and a wide choice of other Microsoft software from Microsoft DreamSpark. If your college or university is part of this program, you can download any software you need by entering your college username and password and accessing to your school's software store. If you're a Stark State student, you should ask your instructor for the current link to the college store. 

 Steps

1.  Install VMware Player to your local computer (for Stark State students, download and install version 5.0.1; anybody else may use the current version).
2. Create a new virtual machine by using a genuine ISO image of Windows 7 Professional, previously downloaded from DreamSpark.
3. Copy the newly created virtual machine from My Documents/Virtual Machines  folder to your external hard drive.

Create the virtual machine

1.  Open VMware player and choose Create a New Virtual Machine.
2.  Choose the genuine ISO image of Windows 7 downloaded from Microsoft DreamSpark and click Next.
3.  Enter the serial number supplied by Microsoft and click Next.
4. Give your virtual machine a name and accept the default location proposed (C:\My Documents\Virtual Machines).
5. Define the size of your virtual machine and decide whether to select Store virtual disk as a single file (more suitable for large drives) or Split virtual disk into multiple files (recommended for smaller drives).  Click Next and, in the subsequent window, choose Finish to start creating your virtual machine.
6.  At this point, the virtual machine creation process will start. After the process has finished, power off the virtual machine and close VMware player.
7. Copy My Documents/Virtual Machines folder to your external hard drive. To run your virtual machine, you'll only have to open it from your external hard drive on any PC having VMware Player installed. For Stark State Students, if VMware Player is already present on your class computer, it will automatically run the Windows 7 VM as an existing virtual machine. If VMware Player isn't currently installed to your class computer, you'll have to install it first (choosing the local hard drive as a destination).