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liomry
Contributor
Contributor

Retrieving the "displayName" property from .vmx

Hi All,

Firstly I have read all the discussions and blogs I can access on this. I'm trying to retrieve the displayName property from a .vmx file. I have not set this manually but when I edit the xml I can see it is present.

I have tried vmware-rpctool and  vmtoolsd --cmd with the following

'info-get displayName'  - returns "invalid key name supplied"

'info-get guestinfo.displayName' - returns "No value found"

Am I missing a part of the correct key? From the following blog I understood that the properties in the vmx should be accessible from the guest whether they have been user defined or not -

http://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2011/01/how-to-extract-host-information-from.html

I am running ESXi 4.1 and the vmware-toolbox-cmd -v returns 8.3.12.8191 (build-4993255)

I can see that the info is present as you can see from vmx extract below. Any help is greatly appreciated. My end goal is to set the hostname of cloned systems to the displayName of the guest.

.encoding = "UTF-8"
config.version = "8"
virtualHW.version = "7"
pciBridge0.present = "TRUE"
pciBridge4.present = "TRUE"
pciBridge4.virtualDev = "pcieRootPort"
pciBridge4.functions = "8"
pciBridge5.present = "TRUE"
pciBridge5.virtualDev = "pcieRootPort"
pciBridge5.functions = "8"
pciBridge6.present = "TRUE"
pciBridge6.virtualDev = "pcieRootPort"
pciBridge6.functions = "8"
pciBridge7.present = "TRUE"
pciBridge7.virtualDev = "pcieRootPort"
pciBridge7.functions = "8"
vmci0.present = "TRUE"
nvram = "Fedora_15_x86_64.nvram"
virtualHW.productCompatibility = "hosted"
powerType.powerOff = "soft"
powerType.powerOn = "hard"
powerType.suspend = "hard"
powerType.reset = "soft"
displayName = "Fedora_15_x86_64"

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a_p_
Leadership
Leadership

From what I understand from this blog (and what I tested successfully) you need to specify individual "guestinfo." entries in the .vmx file.

guestinfo.[variable] = [value]

André

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