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silverbios
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Shared VM gone in workstation 16!

After installing version 16, I realized that the Shared-VM feature was removed and there is no "hostd" service on Linux but in windows "hostd" exist but there is not any section for configuration in GUI or CLI!

this a bug or completely removed!?

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scott28tt
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Please see the Product Support Notice section: VMware Workstation 16 Pro Release Notes


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Although I am a VMware employee I contribute to VMware Communities voluntarily (ie. not in any official capacity)
VMware Training & Certification blog

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silverbios
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good news for a limited time, Share VM back in 16.1 version!
thanks, WS team for listening to our feedback.

WS.png

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59 Replies
scott28tt
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Please see the Product Support Notice section: VMware Workstation 16 Pro Release Notes


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Although I am a VMware employee I contribute to VMware Communities voluntarily (ie. not in any official capacity)
VMware Training & Certification blog
fiftyfour46
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What's strange for me is that my Shared VMs from 15 with auto-start enabled still start ... seems like a bug.

It would have been nice to include this in What's New or an Upgrade doc.

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mfelker
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We are like mushrooms.  Leave us in the dark and feed us [removed by moderator]   This is why they reduced the price.   I'm using VMware Tech Preview 20H2 on Windows in an unlimited license.    Whether or not I get my money back from VMware is another matter.   This corporate, not technical, decision sucks.

scott28tt
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Moderator: Please keep your tone and language professional, as per the Code of Conduct and Terms of Use. Your post above has been edited.


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Although I am a VMware employee I contribute to VMware Communities voluntarily (ie. not in any official capacity)
VMware Training & Certification blog
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pwolf
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I think, this was removed, because they did not want to resolve the problems introduced by WS 15.5.5 with remote connections. That is always the easiest way to resolve problems. But not very customer friendly.

Especially since the outbreak of the Covid Disease all over the world, which makes it sometimes necessary to work from remote, the removal of remote console access for VMs running under Vmware Workstation is a sign of complete ignorance of Vmware Workstation customers.

douglasids
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This is a real pain for me.  Our lab does forensic testing and builds duplicate environments for testing and observation.  So now we can no longer have multiple people working in the same environment from different machines looking at different aspects of a malware attack, suspected bad app, breached servers, etc.  This really puts a kink in how we work.  Is the rational that VMware expect everyone to buy server licenses?  We already have one, but workstation is just faster and portable when loaded on a laptop workstation vs remoting in (which we can't do as our lab is air gapped).

I am wondering, what is the mission statement for Workstation now?  With COVID and most of us now working from home, this makes an upgrade to 16 much harder to justify as we can't all go get hardware to run servers on which defeats the need for workstation.

A very sad day indeed 😞

douglasids
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WS 15.5.5 remote connections has been resolved.  There is a work around if you hunt for the thread.

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axelbest
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I'm rolling back to VMWare 15

I hope every customer do the same thing, until you decide put this feature back.

jmdev
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Whichever product manager made this decision needs to be fired. This is a completely bungled release of a product with fewer features. You don't just drop this information on end users. You have to set expectations. The mentality that product development has taken of asking for forgiveness from it's user base instead of asking permission, or in this case setting expectations is toxic and is untenable.

Feature removals should be deprecated for at least one major version and warnings to the end user while they're using the product.

Rolling back to 15. I will never purchase another version of VMWare again. I'll be recommending my organization move in another direction than ESXi clusters, maybe AWS is a better choice. They add features and do not remove them without notification.

dejanrodiger
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Workaround doesn't work.

-- Dejan
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mb_de
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Really disappointed by vmware to drop central feature. Not funny.:smileyshocked: As I am involved in decision making for products I will strongly vote against vmware from now on. MB

Max3141
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I've said it before and I'll say it again...  It's a slap in the face to customers.

wila
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Hi,

While it won't be the "Shared VM" feature as was available before Workstation 16, I am currently working on something that might help fill in the gap for some of the workflows.

It is a new product called "Vimarun".

Vimarun allows you to select and schedule VM's running on VMware Workstation 16.0 or VMware Player 16.0 to start with your host.

It should also take care on automatically suspending guests on shutdown and reboot (it seems to work, but needs more robust testing to see how well my current approach for that works)

Anybody interested in this and wanting to see if this would help them is welcome to sign up for the private beta at https://vimarun.com

Alternatively, if you don't want to test, you can still fill out the form and leave some feedback on what you need.

For now, vimarun is only for Windows hosts.

Please note that it will be a few more days before I will make the beta available.

While it works now, I want to make things a tad more polished and test some more before others can play with it.

Hope this helps,

--

Wil

| Author of Vimalin. The virtual machine Backup app for VMware Fusion, VMware Workstation and Player |
| More info at vimalin.com | Twitter @wilva
munrobasher
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Quite and going back to v15...

real_skydiver
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This decision is pure politically motivated. It aims to make life harder for users who have a need to run VM's besides their local desktop (for which I think the Workstation Player is sufficient enough). Well VMWare, let me tell you: users can be political too! In my carer I've talked quite a few customers into buying Workstation Pro. Of course this includes myself. My counterpart political decision is to stop all of that. Version 15 (and even older) is 'good enough' for many more years to come - I'll stick with that until for whatever reason technically no feasible anymore. And than I'll carefully evaluate any other option available.

Bye!

max2g
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Removing sharing functionality is a very bad decision from VMWare !

I use Workstation since many years and sharing was very important for me.

And now, what do I do ???

I really don't understand why they decide that.

real_skydiver
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And now, what do I do ???

My advise: stick with v15 as long as you can.

mac671
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This is a huge let down.

All my VM's which I've set up in Ver 15 work just fine and still work as shared VM's.

I only realized this when I wanted to add a new one....

I think taking away a feature ... as part of an upgrade is a sneaky way to do business. Not very cool .

adza77
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Thank goodness I just found this thread.

I was about to hit the go on 3 x upgrades plus 1x new purchase.

That's changed to 0 x Nothing at this point until I evaluate the future of our direction (yet again <sigh>).

Honestly VMWare - what's going on internally? You seem to be taking the fast food company approach of bring out a new burger, let the public taste it and enjoy it for a while and then remove it again - rather than giving us something that we can be comfortable and rely on for the future.

It gives very little feeling of reliability if we don't know that the future of a product may or may not be able to continue to meet our needs. What's next? Are snapshots the next thing to go?