If you are a user of VMware Player, you may have wondered whether
it's possible to run VMware player without GUI. For example, when you
are accessing VMware hosts via SSH remotely, you may want to
run VMware Player from the command line.
While you can use X11 forwarding over SSH to launch VMware player's
GUI from remote locations, it will be rather inconvenient if the SSH
connection is slow. Furthermore, the VM launched inside VMware Player's
GUI window will automatically be stopped when you close the VMware
Player window.
If you would like to
start or stop VMware Player VMs without GUI, you can use
vmrun which is a command-line utility which one can use to automate operations on VMware virtual machines (VMs).
vmrun is contained in VMware VIX API libraries which are freely downloadable from
VMware website. You can follow the instructions below to manage VMware Player VMs remotely.
It is assumed that you have already created a VM using VMware Player, and
so have *.vmx files ready somewhere. Now you want to start/stop the VM
using
vmrun. You don't need root permission to use
vmrun command.
First, download VMware VIX for Linux, and then install it on the VMware host as follows.
$ chmod 755 ./VMware-VIX-1.11.0-471780.x86_64
$ sudo ./VMware-VIX-1.11.0-471780.x86_64
To start VM:
$ vmrun -T player start /path/to/vm/my.vmx nogui
To reboot VM:
$ vmrun -T player reset /path/to/vm/my.vmx soft
To power off VM:
$ vmrun -T player stop /path/to/vm/my.vmx soft
