VMware Communities
drewmmiranda
Contributor
Contributor
‎02-15-2023 03:58 PM

VMs started via Autostart are no longer managable via the gui

Not sure if i'm missing something. The documentation for Autostart doesn't really provide much detail beyond enabling autostart. I've enabled autostart service and selected 2 VMs to autostart. This works perfectly, however, those vms appear as powered off when opening the vmware workstation gui.

Supposedly a workaround to this (although the documentation isn't clear) is to configure the autostart service to run as the same user account you login to windows with. However, im using a microsoft account and as far as I can tell there is no way to cnofigure a service to logon to this account.

Not sure if a bug or just a lack of functionality but its impractical to be unable to manage the vm like this.

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2 Replies
Newport1005
Contributor
Contributor
‎02-16-2023 07:51 AM

There is a limit to the authentication used by the M$ account, similar issues occur using RDP.

Follow the steps to create a normal account and later link in your M$ account to get all those benefits.

 

 

 

 

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munrobasher
Enthusiast
Enthusiast
‎04-07-2023 03:55 AM

I personally don't think the new auto start functionality is complete - they've implemented the core functionality but outstanding IMO is:

  1. Ability to manage/take-over the auto started VMs from the WS console. I believe the problem is that because they are often started under a different account (e.g. SYSTEM) that they can't interact with your desktop. Okay. I can accept that but there should be someway to take over from the console. You can do this manually by using psexec with the -s (run as system) flag and vmrun to suspend the VM. You can then resume it in the console
  2. Auto started VMs aren't cleanly shutdown when the host shuts down! Now this one MUST be corrected as effectively you're crashing the VMs when you shut the PC down. It should at least suspend the VM

I'm currently working up a script to run when my host shuts down to suspend any auto-started virtual machines. The start of this is running this command to get list of virtual machines:

psexec -s "C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Workstation\vmrun.exe" list

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