Sound in Virtual Machine - ESX VSphere

[callington]

Hi all, we are currently experiencing problems playing sound through a RDP connection from VSphere Version 7 XP machines.

VMWare tools is installed on all machines, and has even been reinstalled on most as we thought it could possibly be a corrupt installation of tools. Sound is also enabled in our terminals RDP connection to 'bring audio local' yet whenever we try to play sound in Media Player we get the following error message:

"Windows media player cannot play sound. There is a problem with your sound device. There might not be a sound device installed on your computer, it might be in use by another program, or it might not be functioning properly"

It is not just media player which cannot play the sounds however, in DXDiag it states there is no sound device installed. Sound will also not work when logged on directly to the console so I can't see this being an issue with the RDP connection we have set up.

Does anyone have any idea what may be causing this problem?

[Texiwill]

Hello,

ESX does not actually give to any VMs sound devices, that is a workstation, server, fusion, player option. So no, this will not work as you expect.

Best regards,
Edward L. Haletky VMware Communities User Moderator, VMware vExpert 2009

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[PaulSvirin]

Maybe it is worth trying this hint:

---

Paul Svirin

StarWind Software developer ( http://www.starwindsoftware.com )

[callington]

Cheers Paul, we have already checked that and it is set up correctly. I'm not sure if it's quite the correct way but following advice from this topic (editing our VMX files) sound appears to be working now.

Thanks again however!

[callington]

Followed advice found in this topic (http://communities.vmware.com/thread/134581) regarding editing VMX files.

[mirasam]

For the HD Audio, I edit the vmx configuration file of the VM using the following link in order to get sound on Linux VMs.

http://virtualization.blognotions.com/2011/07/27/virtual-hd-audio-hardware-in-vsphere-5/ so where is the problem!!

[jjlin]

Since a lot of the links in previous responses are dead now, here's an inline procedure that's worked for me:

1. Make sure the VM is powered off.
2. SSH into the ESXi host and cd into /vmfs/volumes/<datastore>/<vm-dir>
3. Edit the .vmx file (e.g., using the builtin vi editor), adding the following lines:
   sound.autodetect = "TRUE"
   sound.fileName = "-1"
   sound.present = "TRUE"
   sound.virtualDev = "hdaudio"
4. Power on the VM. Hopefully, there should be a "High Definition Audio Device", and you should be able to play test sounds through the VMware Remote Console (the console display started from the vSphere Web Client; the native VMware vSphere Client didn't work for me).

This page has some useful info on sound settings in .vmx files:

http://sanbarrow.com/vmx/vmx-sound.html​

Or check Wayback Machine if it ever goes down:

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://sanbarrow.com/vmx/vmx-sound.html