Auto-Suspend Guest VMs on Host Power Loss (Workstation Pro 15.5.2)

[sargehendricks]

Hello Everyone,

I hope this is not redundant, but I didn't see any threads on this topic previously.

I am trying to find out if anyone knows how one might go about auto-suspending guest VMs if/when the host (laptop) loses wired power.  I have spent a good part of the day recovering VM OSes, because power was lost last night... and the battery died before I got to the machine to gracefully shutdown the VMs.  As a result, I was greeted with BSODs when booting them today.

My assumption is that I will need to do this via Powershell, as the host is a Windows 10 machine, but before I went down the path of reinventing the wheel, I thought I would check to see if anyone else had ever had this issue and produced a solution for it.

Thank you, in advance, for your time and assistance.

[wila · Accepted solution]

Hi,

For a shared VM you can set it to auto-suspend when the host shuts down.

Having said that, shared VM's do come with a number of limitations that might make them not suitable for you.

See this KB article for more details on those limitations: http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2005585

In short:

When you share a virtual machine, you lose these features:

       Unity

       Shared Folders

       AutoProtect

       drag and drop

       copy and paste

       Thin Print

       Ability to connect/redirect USB devices from the host to the virtual machine not available with Workstation 8.x

       3D Acceleration

But you're not the first bumping into this.

See this thread for more details:

VMWare Workstation 12.5 Auto Suspend of Guests when Windows Host Shuts Down

hope this helps,

--

Wil

[sargehendricks]

Thank you, Wila!

I will definitely look into this.  The pains of trying to recover a VM that has been even partially corrupted due to an improper shutdown is not only frustrating, but also quite time-consuming.  I would like to eliminate this issue as much as possible going forward.

Thank you, again.

[wila]

Hi,

Well... backups might also help.

But that is then said by somebody who has backup software for sale ...

However with that disclaimer in mind, backups do help against loosing a lot of time on cases of corruption or hardware failure.

Note that you can actually use my software for free if you don't mind pressing the button to backup every now and then.

It's still an improvement over manually copying a VM as you can make backups with the VM running.

--

Wil