Is there any replacement for shared VMs in 16.2.x yet?

[Pickwick81]

The release notes of Workstation 16.1.2 contain the following sentences:

• Deprecation of the Shared virtual machine feature
  The Shared virtual machine feature (VMware Workstation as server) is being deprecated. It will remain in its present form for the remainder of the VMware Workstation 16 product life. This feature will be not available in a future release

Though, shared VMs have been removed in 16.2.0:

• The shared virtual machine feature is no longer supported from Workstation 16.2.0 Pro.

In the past, some docs and VMware employees mentioned that those shared VMs are coming back, only with some different implementation. I can't see anything in that direction in 16.2.0 currently.

So, is there any replacement for shared VMs in 16.2.x yet? If not, are there any additional plans known already?

Thanks!

[a_p_]

I'm afraid that this feature won't come back.

An alternative created by VMTN user @wila is https://vimarun.com/

André

[Pickwick81]

Thanks, I know that project already and ran into multiple limitations with my use case and it can't replace what shared VMs provided.  Especially accessing OS UIs within VMs for pretty old OS with no RDP/TeamViewer or alike is a big problem for all those solutions. Tested VBOX for the same and it has even more limitations in this use case. Of course, shared VMs had limitations as well, especially when it comes to configuring VMs, which made copying VMs elsewhere necessary, but that was less important. Things worked pretty well besides that, VMs were automatically started/suspended, UIs accessible by different OS-users using the VMware GUI etc.

So, it seems that I'm stuck for some customers with existing Windows hosts at 16.1.2 as the last version of VMware usable for this kind of use case. Need to migrate all of those to Proxmox in the long term, don't like what VMware does with Workstation. They were simply lying regarding shared VMs.

[wila]

Hi,

Thanks for the mention of vimarun and trying it.
The features in vimarun are indeed slightly different from the shared virtual machine one.

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@Pickwick81 wrote:

Thanks, I know that project already and ran into multiple limitations with my use case and it can't replace what shared VMs provided.  Especially accessing OS UIs within VMs for pretty old OS with no RDP/TeamViewer or alike is a big problem for all those solutions.

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Sounds like you are trying to connect remotely to the UI of some VM's.

Have you considered using VMware Workstation's built-in VNC support?

More here: Configure a virtual machine as a VNC server

--
Wil

[Pickwick81]

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@wila wrote:

Sounds like you are trying to connect remotely to the UI of some VM's.
Have you considered using VMware Workstation's built-in VNC support?

I need VMs running independently of any logged on users first, want VMs to start/suspend automatically with the host and then want to manage those running VMs using some GUI from any other user, including a console view on the current OS UI. Shared VMs of VMware Workstation provides all that and neither VBOX nor VIMARUN nor ... work reliably for that use case of having an existing (Windows) host without any virtualization underneath it.

[wila]

Hi,

Manage VMs from another host -or same host another user- is on my wish list to implement for vimarun, but sadly I cannot give you a date on when that will arrive.

For a console, the VNC support should work.

Also AFAIK vimarun works reliably. If that's not the case in your scenario then I'd be happy to look into that. There's a lot of people that are using vimarun and there are very few complaints about it not being reliable.

I'm aware of one issue where on a domain controller host, it would try to start VM's too early. That's easily fixed by changing the vimarun windows service to "delayed start" instead of "start" and that's currently the only issue I am aware about.

--
Wil

[Simpson1]

user @wila is https://vimarun.com/     -  Check your https certificate - says expired 

[wila]

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@Simpson1 wrote:

user @wila is https://vimarun.com/     -  Check your https certificate - says expired 

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Hi, thanks.

Weird.. that should have auto-renewed. I just manually renewed it.

--
Wil

[TJP1955]

That's a deal breaker for me. I guess we'll use 16.1 for as long as we can and then look for non-VMWare.

[DMBMC]

I agree! At one point VMware said they were going to support Shared VMs throughout the entirety of v16, but apparently they lied and removed that important feature prematurely.  It's very disappointing really! 

[unicomp21]

disappointing, very disappointing

[Pickwick81]

Workstation 17 has a new autostart feature which pretty much reads like what was available before. The official docs mention permission requirements an configured paths as well, which sound like an easier implementation than before, where VMs needed to be copied locally between different datastores. So if anyone is able to test things, I would be interest in feedback.

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The user you specify must have the following rights:

• Write access to the vmAutoStart.xml file located in %ALLUSERSPROFILE%\VMware\VMware Workstation\vmAutoStart.xml.
• Ownership to the VMX files specified in the vmAutoStart.xml file.

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https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Workstation-Pro/17/com.vmware.ws.using.doc/GUID-44497201-A4AC-4867...

[_Royce_]

Problem with WS 17 is shutdown/reboot the host and Auto Started VMs get killed.  I've found no way to have them gracefully shutdown.

[sf29]

I'm having this problem too.  for autostarted VM, is there a way to connect using the VMware GUI?  I don't want to use my windows account to start the service because my password changes every 30 days.  when I use the windows service account, it works, but I cannot connect to it in the VMware workstation gui.