Auto-Starting your VMs - Howto

[Martijn]

Basically it's even easier than I thought. I have been looking through this for a while, and the best thing was to create a batch file that would allow the VMs to start-up. It will even allow you to start them when you're away from your pc (at night, for example). Just create a new text-file and save it as a .bat file.

.bat for non-teamed VMs:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Workstation\vmware.exe" -q -x "E:\Copy 1\XSOs Copy 1.vmx" "E:\Copy 2\XSOs Copy 2.vmx" "E:\Copy 3\XSOs Copy 3.vmx" "E:\Copy 4\XSOs Copy 4.vmx" "E:\Copy 5\XSOs Copy 5.vmx" "E:\Copy 6\XSOs Copy 6.vmx" "E:\Copy 7\XSOs Copy 7.vmx" "E:\Copy 8\XSOs Copy 8.vmx"

You will need to edit the location of VMWare Workstation, the location of your VMs and their names, but I think you all know that .

.bat for teamed VMs (which allows you to let them boot at intervals as well):

"C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Workstation\vmware.exe" -q -x "E:\Team\Team 1.vmtm"

Same story here. You'll need to rename everything.


If you want to only run your VMs at night to keep them from network lagging, just use the built-in function 'scheduled task'. To start the batch file at boot, just place it in your startup folder (doh).

The VM team-batch will not close by itself, but that is not really an issue I think.


Hope this helps some of you, it did for me