VMware Automation

Vmware provides inbuilt support to automate various operations on a virtual machine such as taking snapshot,starting VM,Running program in VM and so on. The vmrun command is used to control Virtual machines. It provides support both to WorkStation and VSphere client.

 This tutorial is dedicated to control Virtual Machines only on WorkStation.


Getting started with VMRUN command

• Pre-Requistes:
• .Have a workstation installed on your host machine
• Install any Virtual machine of your choice in the WorkStation
• Locate the path of vmrun.exe file.
• 32 Bit Machine -The default location is C:\Program Files \VMware\VMware VIX
• 64 bit machine -The default location is C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware VIX
• Locate path of .vmx or .vmtm file
• The default path is C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\My Documents\My Virtual Machines\Windows 8X62\Windows 8x64.vmx
• Steps 1: In the host machine where workstation is installed open command prompt in administrator mode.

• Step 2: Navigate and open vmrun.exe.     

           In this case it is located in C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware VIX

• Step 3:Now type vmrun in the command prompt.

            If successful you should get a list of Vmrun commands.

Vmrun Commands:

The commonly used commands are shown below:

Example:To perform the following tasks:

1.          Start VM with a known username and password
2.          Run calculator program in VM
3.          Take snapshot of the VM

•     The below command starts the vm where username is "gpb" and password is "a"
•  vmrun  -gu gpb -gp a start "C:\Users\gpb\Documents\Virtual               Machines\Windows 8 x64(2)\Windows 8 x64 (2).vmx"
•      The below command runs calaculator program
•  vmrun  -gu gpb -gp a runprograminguest "C:\Users\gpb\Documents\Virtual Machines\Windows 8 x64 (2)\Windows 8 x64 (2).vmx" -nowait -interactive "C:\Windows\system32\calc.exe"

•     The following command takes a snapshot with snapshot name as demo
•     vmrun snapshot "C:\Users\gpb\Documents\Virtual Machines\Windows 8 x64 (2)\Windows 8 x64 (2).vmx"  demo

To run all these commands together we can store these commands in a batch file and execute the corresponding batch script.

To learn about creating batch files click on next tutorial!