Suggestion Vimarun...

[Sontec]

Hi Wil,
To get rid of the Vm blackscreen, you somehow pause the the VM and unpause it.

Now I was wondering, if somehow you could recreate the VmWare Workstation GUI,
couldn't you incorporate VNC viewer within Vimarun GUI ?

This way the VM would always be visible in the GUI (no black screen).
Securiy wise one could even lock down the firewall (automomatically) to only be 
able to view the VMs locally (if network security was an issue).

This way the VM should never be paused even if it was briefly.
If the "Vimarun" GUI would work over the network,
one could even use it as a command centre GUI to
stop and start diffirent VMs on diffirent hosts.

What are you thought on this suggestion ?

[wila]

Hi Wil,
To get rid of the Vm blackscreen, you somehow pause the the VM and unpause it.

Hi Sontec,

Correct. If the VM is started before login, then Windows security dictates that there is no desktop to assign the screen to. As such the VM runs outside of the desktop environment.
In order to work around that, the VM is suspended on login and quickly resumed once a desktop is available. It's not a perfect solution, but still better than trying to hack around Windows security.

Now I was wondering, if somehow you could recreate the VmWare Workstation GUI,
couldn't you incorporate VNC viewer within Vimarun GUI ?
This way the VM would always be visible in the GUI (no black screen).
Securiy wise one could even lock down the firewall (automomatically) to only be 
able to view the VMs locally (if network security was an issue).
This way the VM should never be paused even if it was briefly.
If the "Vimarun" GUI would work over the network,
one could even use it as a command centre GUI to
stop and start diffirent VMs on diffirent hosts.
What are you thought on this suggestion ?

While I have no intention to mimic the workstation GUI, this type of research is indeed on my list of things to look into.
Not sure when I get a chance to look into that though, probably not any day soon.

Note that VMware Workstation already has VNC support.. you can configure that on a per VM basis.
See also:
Configure a Virtual Machine as a VNC server

--
Wil