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mstreibe
Contributor
Contributor

VMware Workstation Player 15 resizes guest window on suspend/resume

I'm running a Windows 10 VM inside of VMware Workstation Player 15 on an Ubuntu 18.04 LTS laptop with an internal 1920x1080 display and a external 1920x1200 monitor. VMware Tools is installed in the VM.

The Windows VM is supposed to always run in full screen mode on the external monitor with the 1920x1200 resolution. This works in general, but when I suspend the VM, vmplayer will always switch to windowed mode and resizes the window (and with it the VM's screen) to something very small before suspending the VM. As a result, on resume of the VM, all program windows in the VM have resized themselves to fit the small screen resolution, and I have to manually make them large again, which is rather annoying.

I previously ran the same setup with Oracle VirtualBox. It didn't have this issue but I had to abandon this platform for other reasons.

Is there any way to tell vmplayer to stick to fullscreen mode? Running "vmplayer -X <VM name>" does not help, none of the VM settings in the GUI seem to address this, and I also couldn't find any useful setting for the vmx file.

How to prevent this automatic window resize?

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McCleese
Contributor
Contributor

I have one virtual machine with this same problem.  This does not happen with all of my virtual machines.  When I resume the guest operating system, it automatically switches the display to full screen even though the guest was not full screen when suspended.  Then if I exit full screen mode, it resizes the display to 800 x 600, even though the original screen resolution before the suspend was 1280 x 1024.

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McCleese
Contributor
Contributor

I figured out how to make it stop.  I manually edited the *.vmx file using notepad found in the folder where the virtual machine resides.

I removed the following two entries:

gui.lastPoweredViewMode = "fullscreen"

gui.viewModeAtPowerOn = "fullscreen"

After removing these two entries from the file, the screen resolution of the guest is no longer manipulated by VMWare upon resume.

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mstreibe
Contributor
Contributor

Thanks for that input. I didn't try it though because I'm now running Workstation Pro, which doesn't have the issue. Its GUI is much better. I got the impression that the player GUI is kind of a step child which does not get much attention from VMware, given its reduced feature set and limitations.

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