Workstation on windows - how to automate/script network changes?

[neergaard]

We have a situation where there is a number of machines that need to change their virtual network settings and then change them back.  It is easy enough to do this manually using the network editor, but this is a problem when it needs to be done to MANY machines in a short period of time.

We thought that simply changing the vmnetnat.conf and vmnetdhcp.conf files would solve the problem.  We have a remote script that can replace those files to multiple machines.  But that doesn't work....

It looks like the vmware processes get their config info from the registry and not from the conf files.  But, when the config is changed through the editor, it persists it to BOTH the registry and the files.  Changing the files alone seems to work on a Linux base (no registry to deal with), but we are forced to work on Windows in this case.

QUESTIONS:

- is there are way to force the vmware processes to read the config files and update the registry?

- is there a command line approach that we can use?

Thanks!

[continuum]

On Windows that should be quite easy - though I never tried with Win10 hosts.
The tools to use are vnetlib64.exe and a few  more.
Instructions are on my homepage: http://sanbarrow.com/network/cmdguide2workstation.html
http://sanbarrow.com/network/commandlineguide2vnets.html   Replace vnetlib with the vnetlib64 if necessary.

[neergaard]

Thanks for those links.  Funny enough, I did read your posts prior to posting the question, and those utils were my backup plan.

But, in a couple of my cases, I have been handed setups where I don't actually know what has specifically changed.  I just have those config files and am not 100% how to replicate the specific changes.  So, if there was a mechanism that allowed me to trigger Workstation to re-read those files and treat them as the 'master' information, that would be ideal. 

Does anyone know if that is possible? Thanks!