Open VMware Workstation 9 and choose Create a New Virtual Machine.

A New Virtual Machine Wizard opens. Choose Custom(advanced) item and click Next.

On page Choose the Virtual Machine Hardware Compatibility choose Hardware compatiblity for this virtual machine. If you plan to use this virtual machine only on your computer select Workstation .0 hardware compatibility. If you plan to use this machine with other VMware tools, choose appropriate hardware compatibility and check Compatible products and Limitations.

On Guest Operating System Installation page choose how you want to install operating system on this virtual machine. Choose Installer disc if you have an instalation DVD in your DVD reader. If you have an image (iso) file, choose Installer disc image file (iso): and browse to that iso file. VMware Workstation recognizes that iso image for Windows 8 was selected and will use Easy Install to install that operating system. Easy Install installs operating system unattended. This tutorial will continue using this feature. If you do not want to configure guest operating system right now, just select I will install the operating system later.

We have selected Easy install in previous step. Now we need to set up som basic information that will be used by Easy Install. Insert a Windows product key for your new operating system. Choose a version of windows to install - this depends on licence you have bought. Finally, enter your name and password - these will be used to create your account on guest operating system.

If you did not enter a Windows product key in previous step, following window appears. If you want to add Windows product key, click No and enter that key. Otherwise, click Yes.

Enter name of this virtual machine and location where it should be stored on your disk. Make sure that location has enough free space.

Choose how many processors should be available for this virtual machine. Possible options depends on configuation of your physical computer. If you're not sure what to set here, select one processor and two cores per processor (as you can see on picture).

Now choose how much memory will be available for this virtual machine. Where possible, use recommended memory or more.

Now choose what type of virtual network will be available for virtual machine. Simplest configuration is Use network address translation (NAT). In this case virtual machine will not be discoverable on network and all network traffic originated in virtual machine will be seen as from your physical computer.
If you want to simulate another computer on your physical network, select Use bridged networking. Now your virtual machine will be seen as another physical computer on your network.
If you want to communicate from your virtual machine only with your physical computer, and nothing more, select Use host-only networking.
If you do now want to configure networking select Do not use a network connection.

Choose what type of controller you want to use. For most scenarios a recommended value is best choice.

Last thing that should be configured for new virtual machine is disk. Now choose which disk you want to use. Ussualy you want to Create a new virtual disk.
Other options choose only if you exactly know what you are doing (especially last one - if not properly configured, you may loose some data, since you're using your real physical disc for virtual machine).

Select what kind of disk you want to create. In most cases a recommended value is the best.

Now specify maximum disk size of your new disk. To avoid low free space issues, use recommended value or higher. Remember, this is only virtual disk, so its real size ( on your real hard drive) will be based on the amout of data stored on that disk. This way you can create a 60 GB virtual disk on even if you have 20 GB free space. But make sure to free more space later, because you will still be able to store only that 20 GB on your virtual disk.
If you want to allocate all disk space now, click Allocate all disk space now.

Finally, specify name for a file that will store your new disk.

Now you may review settings you have configured. You may also customize your hardware (add more disk, network adapters, sound card,...). If you do not want to power on this virtual machine now, set that checkbox to not checked. Otherwise, this virtual machine will be powered on and starts to install configured operating system.