I was recently introduced to VMware Workstation 3.1 by überscripter Torgeir Bakken, and have taken to using it for all of my cross-platform scripting tests and Terminal Services/Remote Desktop scripting.
The intent of this page is to provide you with information about using VMware particularly in scripting in Terminal Services contexts. So far, all I've done is a basic bit with the scripting - in fact, this page is mostly a placeholder between my main tools page and the basic script library for VMware...
It was a given that I would want to script VMware. So far, nothing doing with VMware Workstation, but I got the demo of VMware GSX server and began working with it.
This is colorized VBScript code for very basic library of functions for use with VMware GSX. It includes:
Miscellaneous technical info about VMware
VMware Workstation 3.x and GSX 2.x both use files ending with a .vmx on Windows systems to store VM config information; here are some notes about the files, focusing primarily on documenting the parameters used in them.
If you've tried this, you know the mouse/video performance is horrible.
The reason is that the RC distributions of .NET install with all hardware acceleration OFF. Start your .NET server in VMware, log in, and go to display properties. Select the "Settings" tab, click the "Advanced" button, and then select the "Troubleshoot" tab on the new popup. Push the Hardware Acceleration slider all the way right to Full, OK your way out, and it works great.
I've had erratic issues with this while demoing GSX; the cause always has been the VMware Authorization Service (VMAuthdService) suddenly driving up CPU utilization. The process name is vmauthd-service (apparently, the VMware services are not written to run within svchost).
You can just stop the service and restart it to fix the problem:
net stop VMAuthdService net start VMAuthdService
The tell-tale signs are almost always sudden rapid mouse dropout which persists for anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes. It has been most apparent when running with a Windows 2000 server as a client for some reason, and is independent of the presence of either the local or remote consoles.
Halting the service instantly resolves the problem. Currently-running VMs will not be affected, nor will currently connected consoles; you can even restart the VM without losing connectivity.