zhuhuibeishadiao/vmware-helper

A command line tool to start, suspend, and stop virtual machines running on VMware Player

Introduction

VMware-Helper is a command line tool to start, stop, suspend virtual images using VMware Player. It includes the basic functionality found in the vmrun tool provided by VMware, but the distributable does not require VMware VIX SDK which comes as a 150MB installer. VMware-Helper is 14MB (under 6MB compressed), including the VMware redistributable DLLs.

Usage

Usage: vmware-helper.exe <command> <vmxpath> [options]

  <command>
    the desired action, either `-start`, `-suspend`, `-stop`, or `-status`

  <vmxpath>
    absolute path to the .vmx file for the virtual machine

  [options]
      -nogui: start virtual machine without UI
      -help: shows this help

Examples:
  vmware-helper.exe -start C:\Users\Name\VirtualMachine.vmx
  vmware-helper.exe -stop "C:\Users\User Name\Virtual Machine.vmx"

Additional Files

To obtain the required files install VMware VIX SDK. Copy the following files from the VIX installation to your VMware-Helper directory. Once these are copied you can compile, link and run VMware-Helper without VIX, so feel free to uninstall it if you wish.

Copy to src\vmware

• vix.h
• vix.lib
• vm_basic_types.h

Copy to debug or release folder

• glib-2.0.dll
• gobject-2.0.dll
• gvmomi-vix-1.13.2.dll
• iconv.dll
• intl.dll
• libcurl.dll
• libeay32.dll
• liblber.dll
• libldap_r.dll
• libxml2.dll
• ssleay32.dll
• vix.dll

Note: For running against VMware Player 6, use the DLL files from the Workstation-10.0.0-and-vSphere-5.5.0\32bit folder.