Wow - VMware has killed off Shared VMs in VMware Workstation 16

One of the great features in VMware workstation was the ability to create Shared VMs. There were several good things about these VMs, only one of which was that they could start automatically without having to log onto the host system.

In VMware Workstation 16 that feature was simply abruptly removed with nothing but a one line sentence in the release notes stating that this feature has reached end of life.

This must have been some sort of knee jerk reaction because they didn't even remove all references to the feature in their version 16 User Guide and a clean install of VMware Workstation still installs the VMware Workstation Server service used for Shared VMs.

I guess that I may be going back to Hyper-V!

hsehestedt said:

One of the great features in VMware workstation was the ability to create Shared VMs. There were several good things about these VMs, only one of which was that they could start automatically without having to log onto the host system.

In VMware Workstation 16 that feature was simply abruptly removed with nothing but a one line sentence in the release notes stating that this feature has reached end of life.

This must have been some sort of knee jerk reaction because they didn't even remove all references to the feature in their version 16 User Guide and a clean install of VMware Workstation still installs the VMware Workstation Server service used for Shared VMs.

I guess that I may be going back to Hyper-V!

Hi there
I think a load here have commented on this -- don't upgrade then from V15 !!!!

Personally IMO if you want to run a load of VM's try learning a little bit of Linux -- I know this is a Windows Forum but if you can understand Virtual Machines it shouldn't be that difficult to fire up a decent Linux distro with a reasonably like "Windows GUI". - Linux systems have come a long way from "Geekdom" these days.

Then from any decent Linux Distro simply ensure KVM/QEMU and Virtual machine manager (the GUI) is installed and you've probably got one of the best performing systems for running Virtual machines available -- all FREE of course.

Windows 10 VM's run perfectly on it without any problems whatsoever -- just read and understand the documentation.

Here's an easy way to get started from say a Linux Arch distro (with KDE / KDE plasma desktop)

Complete Installation of KVM, QEMU and Virt Manager on Arch Linux and Manjaro | ComputingForGeeks

Then simply point to your Windows ISO and install.

Shared / background running or whatever -- no problems and performance can be almost 95% or even higher of native when you can pass thru devices such as graphic cards etc.

Beats VMWare a zillion times over - also no probs with getting sound or other eseoteric devices running on the VM --I've got an old Minidisc recorder system working fine on a Windows guest running under KVM/QEMU !!!

Cheers
jimbo

Jimbo, thank you. I very much appreciate the suggestions.

hsehestedt said:

Jimbo, thank you. I very much appreciate the suggestions.

Hi there

@hsehestedt

Note also that these VM's can be set to start automatically from boot (it's in the configuration) and users who need access to these VM's don't need to have accounts at all on the HOST system.

Just make sure though if using automatic boot --that as it's a host LINUX system the appropriate VM image is on a "mounted" file system e.g if your image is say on /dev/sdb - ensure that this is mounted e.g say on /mnt/DV1 or whatever before the VM starts --this can be done by setting entries in fstab - these device / partitions will be mounted at boot time before services like virtual machines start. !!!

Windows VM's can be accessed remotely by all the usual methods - e.g RDP etc and can also be powered off and re-booted remotely if required. It's all in the documentation.

Cheers
jimbo