VMware castrated any way to manage shared VM's

[real_skydiver]

Starting with version 12, VMware decided to drop any methods of controlling shared VM's other than from the GUI. The tool of choice before 12 was 'vmrun' and many, like me, had developed powerful scripts upon this tool such as nightly pause/backup/resume. And I suppose this is exactly the reason why they dropped it: with functionalities like sharing and controlling via scripts the Workstation-Version came way to close to their 'real' products (like vSphere and so on). So dropping the support for shared VMs at the end has no technical but purely political reasons.

Recently VMware came up with a new way of controlling VM's on Workstation: 'VMware Workstation REST API'. I have not the slightest idea what they drove this way but I'm sure someone @ VMware will know. Anyhow, I was hoping for an improvement of this unacceptable situation regarding the shared VMs and I gave this new method a try. As I feared ... no signs of support for shared VMs here either. The 'VMware Workstation REST API Explorer' doesn't even list (GET /vms) the shared ones.

For me that's it with my 'relationship' with VMware. I've being a big fan of them, using their products since they first appeared on the market, in the 'early days' I convinced many people at my previous employer (nickname 'Big Blue') to use VMware and start virtualizing machines. And even after starting my own business I stayed with them, bought any new version - up until now.

[wila]

Hi,

Well.. as it is my virtual machine backup software (Vimalin) is able to use vmrun to manage and backup shared virtual machines for any Workstation version that I am aware about (at least with Workstation 10 and higher), so it _does_ work.

The problem is in getting it authenticated.

There are multiple ways, sorry going from memory, try to run your script under the user "SYSTEM" and see if that helps.

--

Wil

[real_skydiver]

Hi,

I gave you SW a try. What makes me wonder is, that the VM I backed up was not suspended (paused) during backup nor was a snapshot created of any kind. Could you please elaborate on how you're treating this issue?

[wila]

Hi,

Thanks for using Vimalin.

If the VM is running when you make a backup, then Vimalin will make a snapshot before it starts copying the disks.

That snapshot is automatically committed/removed after the backup completes. The backup itself consists of the disks data + memory and state of the VM at the time of the snapshot.

Making a snapshot is basically the only way that you can make a backup of a VM while it is running.

Especially if you want the user to be able to continue using the VM while the backup process is ongoing.

If you didn't see the snapshot process happening, then I'll have to "blame" VMware for handling that nicely in the background. I'm just using their API's and a tiny bit of additional manipulations on some config files.

One way to prove this worked OK is to restore your backup. It should come back as a VM that is suspended and which you can resume from the moment the backup was started.

--

Wil