Rather than booting from a physical CD‐ROM, you can create an ISO image file from the installation CD‐ROM. You can store the ISO file on the host machine or on a network drive accessible from the host machine. Use the configuration tool for your VMware product to connect the virtual machine CD drive to the ISO image file, and turn on the virtual machine.
Using an ISO image file is convenient to install the same operating system in multiple virtual machines. It can also help you avoid a problem in host configurations, in which the virtual machine cannot boot from the installation CD‐ROM.