As compare with qemu, vmware performance is much much better and its peripheral device support is slightly better. But a free version of vmplayer do not support virtual disk creation, it means you can only load the image (in vmdk format) given by others.
With qemu-img, you can create a blank disk image and install any OS on it as your wish. qemu-img is also allow you to convert the disk image from one to another, for example you can dd Damn Small Linux from USB flash disk to hardisk and convert it to vmdk.
Vmplayer need a configuration file (vmx) to load vmdk, you can find sample vmx for reference, google it and you will get it. It do exist vmx builder online for free where you can build vmx based on your input. Refers to
http://www.skrodahl.net/easyvmx/tutorial.html The author does a good job, guilding through you from using qemu-img to create virtual disk till building your own vmx and start install your OSes. It provide virtual disk image with different size for download as well in case you have difficulties to create one.
As my case, I facing problem with creating vmdk using qemu-img, and lately i discovery the causes of my problem. I am using qemu-img to create vmdk image at my FAT partition which i suspect it leads the image created with defects. I try to create and convert disk images at other linux partition and it works fine.
If you facing performance issues at qemu, you may want to give vmware a try although it is not open source. Trust me, the performance is much much better than qemu with kqemu patch. You can realised the differents if you install gkrellm, try to aware of processors used.
To convert an existing disk image let say my winxp.img with qcow format (which is qemu default image format)
qemu-img -f qcow winxp.img -O vmdk winxp.vmdk
Then create vmx using builder online and double click on the vmx that have created, that's it. Here is another reference on how to install Win XP or 2000 for vmplayer under ubuntu.
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=84275
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