Start Virtual Machine Remotely

[dirtbikedude]

First off I'm using vmware workstation 6 the host OS is a windows 2003 server, the guest is windows xp pro. We have multiple windows xp guests and we shut them down to make sure our 2003 server maintains its resources/RAM and so the problem we've run into is how to remotely turn on a specific vm so I thought about possibly what would have to happen is somehow when the user requests a specific vm to startup it would send a request to the 2003 server and it would have some sort of batch file that would compare the one being requested to the rest of the vm's and whichever returned true would be turned on. Now that I've established that I realized how on Earth would I send a request to that server and how would the batch file know when the request comes in!? so I'm stuck does anybody have any ideas on how to do go about this or am I totally off? I'd appreciate any type of help but keep in mind I'm kind of a noob to specific scripting languages if that's the direction you're pushing me into so examples would be great! Thanks I've been struggling with this problem for weeks!

[Liz]

if its 2003, and you have IIS installed you could do a web page that people have to login and you can use the APi calls to determine status etc, and give some elements of contol through that. It would then of course be able to use the API to stop/start/snapshot/revert etc.

[dirtbikedude]

Yes, I understand that but I don't want to give the user full control to the server only to their virtual machine so I almost need something to automatically turn on their virtual machine instead of giving them full acess, our clients aren't the most trustworthy people in the world unfortunately so I'd like to just automatically have it turn on when they press something. Any more ideas?

[continuum]

have you looked at vmrun.exe ?

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description of vmx-parameters:

VMware-liveCD:

[dirtbikedude]

Ya, I understand vmrun.exe...isn't that when you run that command it starts the vm? See I understand that part of it...but more of the problem is I don't know how to send that command remotely to the server and how to get the server to understand which vm to run. I can create a batch file that will tell the server which vm to run but I don't know how I'm going to be able to send that command to the server remotely? Do you have any ideas? or am I misunderstanding the vmrun.exe?

[asatoran]

Get PSTools from Microsoft. In it is PSEXEC , which will run a command on a remote Windows computer.

[dirtbikedude]

sounds good I'll try that...thanks!

[dirtbikedude]

I used the psexec and that fixed everything!