Passthrough internal beep speaker

[Marv21]

Hello, i have an VM that play some tunes with the internal beep speaker, i hear them with the host speakers(over the soundcard).

But i want to hear this beep tones over the host internal beeper. Is this possible? (perfect solution would be, when both, the internal beeper and the soundcard would play the vm beeps)

[dariusd · Accepted solution]

Workstation 11.x and earlier will use the host internal beeper for virtual machine beeps on Windows hosts.  (I don't think we supported a virtual beeper on other host OSes in Workstation 11.x and possibly not for many releases into the past.)

Workstation 12.0 and newer no longer include any support for the host internal beeper.  We had several compelling reasons to stop using the host's beeper, including: Host OS support for the beeper is hit-and-miss, many modern physical PCs no longer include beepers, and it's difficult to safely allow multiple VMs to concurrently share an inherently non-shareable host beeper.  So, we decided that Workstation 12 should no longer attempt to use the host beeper and will instead emulate beeps through the host's regular sound system.  This should function identically across all supported host OSes with multiple VMs running concurrently.

If you absolutely need the host's beeper to be used, you'll need to run your VMs inside Workstation 11.x or earlier.

A request to use the host internal beeper is unexpected and surprising; I'm quite curious to understand why you would prefer to use it, and to see if there is any way we could satisfy your needs without depending on a host beeper.  It would be great if you could share some more details of your requirements and we'll see if we can work something out.

Thanks,

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Darius

[Marv21]

Hello, thanks for your fast and good answer.

Normaly iam not logged in into the Host. But earlier i could hear if someone log in (in the GUI from the VMs Software) or restart the VMs, with the internal host beeper.

I just missed it with WS 12. Thought there is maybe an option anywhere.

Its not vital for me, but was a nice to have.

(and yes, iam siiting in earshot of the Host ).

My Host is indeed Windows and the VM is running freeBSD.

[dariusd]

Ahhh, that's interesting.  Are you using Workstation's "Shared VMs" feature for this?  Those VMs would have been able to beep using the host internal beeper with WS 11 and earlier, but will probably not be able to produce any beeping sound with WS 12 and newer.  I would say that the ability of Shared VMs to use the host's beeper when there's no-one logged into the host console was probably more of a bug than a feature...

Unfortunately, there is no option you can set to restore the old behavior. 

Trying to think of other solutions: If you just need to be notified when the VM is rebooted, you may be able to configure something inside the virtual machine to send you an email (or some other notification over the network) when it boots...  I guess it depends on how promptly you need the notification, whether the VM will have suitable and usable network connectivity, and so on.  It also depends on how much effort it is worth for you to regain that notification.

Cheers,

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Darius