This paper deals with preliminary design conditions for a thermally actuated Vuilleumier refrigerator/heat pump. The previously reported approximate adiabatic analysis which is based on the 8-volume model makes it possible to evaluate exchanged heats per cycle as well as cyclic pressure, temperature and mass variation of each working volume. Calculated results reveal not only there exists an optimum value for the phase angle and the swept volume ratio maximizing a specific thermal output, but also design parameters can be determined independently of each other. Under a given combination of operating temperature levels, the optimum conditions for refrigeration are different from those for heat pumping and the differences between two operating modes become larger with decreasing the dead volume ratio. Both the optimum phase angle and the optimum swept volume ratio are increased asymptotically toward 0.5 pi and 1.0 respectively, as the dead volume ratio approaches to unity. When a VM machine is used for cooling and heating simultaneously, the design parameters should be carefully determined to reach the best performance.