Disable auto-suspend on shutdown

[iainwb]

Is it possible to configure Workstation 12.5 (either by guest or globally) not to auto-suspend a machine on host shutdown? I.e. Windows host complains that there are still running VMs as previous Workstation versions?

I apologize if I've missed a thread outlining this, but all of the ones I see are about guests not suspending, rather than auto-suspend being unwanted behavior. I may well have overlooked a setting, too.

[gimmely]

I'm curious to know, if you don't want (auto-)suspend the running guest(s) when the host is being shut down, what you want to happen to the running guest(s).  Are you implying you want to manually suspend the running guest(s)?

[iainwb]

I'll cancel the host shutdown and shut them down manually, as I always have. The application that they run doesn't survive a suspend and it takes me far longer to recover from suspended VMs than to restart them.

[bluefirestorm]

At the macOS/Fusion and Windows/Linux Workstation Player, there is a preference settings for "When closing a virtual machine" the choice of either "Suspend" or "Power Off".

At the Fusion, when I try to shut down the macOS, it does shutdown the VMs but the shutdown of the macOS itself didn't proceed successfully.

With VMware Workstation Player (at least on the Windows laptop I tried), shutting down Windows 10 host still resulted in "Suspended" VM but closing Player does "Power Off" the VM.

So it might be worth a try to go to the bundled Player application that comes with Workstation and set those Preferences and it might have some of the partial effect that you want.

[gimmely]

Then it's a request for change or enhancement.  I have similar experience in running Cisco AnyConnect + Citrix on one VM to connect to another network, but it's not bad enough for me to complain about auto-suspension.

[iainwb]

It isn't a request for a change. I want to know if the pre-12.5 functionality still exists as an option. It seems the answer is no.

[admin]

Try editing your .vmx file (or, if you want it to apply to all of your VMs run by your user, add it to %APPDATA%\VMware\config.ini

vmx.headless.suspendOnHostShutdown = "FALSE"

[iainwb]

That prevents suspension, but now shutdown powers off the VM in an unsafe state. What I'm looking for is the VM preventing the host shutting down, so that I can cancel shutdown and then shut the VMs down manually.

[admin]

Sorry, there is no way to do that.

Could you perhaps run a script in the guest automatically when it resumes to kill and restart the problematic guest process?

[admin]

Another option would be to run the VM as a Shared VM and configure it to autostart when the host boots.  You then could modify %PROGRAMDATA%\VMware\hostd\vmAutoStart.xml and make sure that all StopAction entries are set to GuestShutdown.  You probably will need to power off (or suspend) the VM and restart the VMware Workstation Server (vmware-hostd) service for the change to take effect.