Hi Gavrobere,

A virtual machine is a type of computer application used to create a virtual environment, which is referred to as virtualization.

VMware is the virtualization technology by VMware Inc.

Likewise Sun has it's technology called VirtualBox etc.,

Every vendor will be have their own way of implementing this concept.

In our tutorials, we are using VMware(product developed by VMware Inc.)

This will create a virutal machine with any operating system of our choice (In our case Linux). we can install any application of our choice inside that Operating system (In our case it's Oracle EBS).

Answering your questions..

1) It's generic stuff, whenever you are transferring files which are huge and interrelated, better zip them and transfer. This is optional.

2) The 'Hardware detail' tab I mentioned is for the Operating System (Linux).

Cheers!
Shanmuga