Background info on my setup I am running VMware Workstation 7.1.2, but this behaviour was the same in 7.1.1 and 7.x in general (upgrading to 7.1.2 didn't help). My hardware is an Intel Q660...
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Background info on my setup I am running VMware Workstation 7.1.2, but this behaviour was the same in 7.1.1 and 7.x in general (upgrading to 7.1.2 didn't help). My hardware is an Intel Q6600 running at 3.2GHz per core (stable overclock), with 8GB DDR2 RAM, nVidia GeForce 8600GT graphics card (512MB) powering two 30" Dell monitors at 2560x1600 over DVI, and a bunch of SATA drives in RAID 0. My host OS is Windows 7 Professional x64, with all updates applied and all drivers up to date also. For the guests I am also using Windows 7 Professional x64, with VMware Tools installed, and all updates applied. What I want to do I have three Windows 7 x64 guests, each of which exists to serve a different purpose. I am a software developer and due to the nature of what I am working on it is important to encapsulate things into three VMs. My working process involves me working in one of the VMs and then changing to one of the other VMs or to the host. I have a lot of windows open and a dual-monitor setup with lots of screen real-estate is important to me. I basically want to be able to move fluidly between the VMs whilst maintaining the dual-monitor setup in each VM, so that my windows stay where I put them. What I have tried, and what happens The first thing I tried was modifying the VMware Workstation display preferences: Autofit window: Off Autofit guest: Off Full screen: Center guest This worked, to an extent. The VM retained its display resolution, and I was able to drop in and out of it to and from the host without issue. This is, in fact, exactly the behaviour I want - but it doesn't work over multiple monitors. When attempting to use multiple monitors, Workstation told me that fullscreen settings had to be set to autofit guest. So, I tried that: Autofit window: Off Autofit guest: Off Full screen: Autofit guest This allowed me to use multiple monitors. I went to fullscreen, got it using my second monitor, and put a window on the second display. I then suspended the machine. When I powered it up again, inside the Workstation window was the full, dual-screen guest, which I could scroll around. Success! Errr... no, not quite. When attempting to go back to fullscreen, it for some reason changed to use only one monitor. Grrrr! Of course, my window moved then. So next I tried changing the guest VM display settings to explicitly set two monitors rather than auto-detecting. Again I tried with Workstation preferences set to both yes and no for fullscreen autofit. I experienced exactly the same behaviour as previously. What I would expect to happen I can understand that with fullscreen set to autofit, the guest resolution might change. Fair enough. However, there should be a way to explicitly set up a guest to have two displays of X by Y pixels, and then maximise that guest over your physical screens. I would expect that if I told Workstation to center in fullscreen that the resolution would not change - and it does not - but I would also expect it to respoect my dual displays, which it does not. I would also expect that if I have explicitly set my VM to have two displays, then this should not get changed by Workstation. Instead, even if I set two displays the guest only detects one until I press the multi-monitor button. How, then, am I supposed to set up a guest with three displays? Or, how is someone else supposed to test a dual-display setup with only one display? Seeing as Workstation allows a guest to have up to 10 monitors - which is extremely unlikely in hardware - there must surely be a way to use those whilst running fullscreen across real physical displays. Ideally, it would be possible to define, in Workstation, which virtual displays are mapped to which physical ones. Help! So... is this a bug in Workstation? Or am I using it wrongly? Perhaps there is a combination that i have not tried yet? Or, maybe there is a secret setting that I can put into my VMX file? Any insight will be mich appreciated.