Strange behaviour Vimarun ?

[Sontec]

I installed Vimarun on a host that was initially running VMware Workstation Pro 15.5.6. Later, I replaced Workstation Pro with version 26H1.
In both installations, the option “Keep VMs running after Workstation closes” was enabled.

I added my VMware guest to Vimarun and tested both the foreground and background options.

When using the “foreground” option:

• The guest VM starts automatically when the host is restarted.
  
• After logging in to the host, VMware Workstation starts automatically and appears within about one minute.
  
• According to VMware Workstation, the guest VM is running.
  
• After logging off from the host user account, I lose the connection to the guest VM after about one minute.
  
• When I log back in to the host, Vimarun shows the guest as stopped with a blue rectangle.
  
• VMware Workstation also shows the VM status as Powered off.
  

When using the “background” option:

• The guest VM starts automatically when the host is restarted.
  
• After logging in to the host, both Vimarun and VMware Workstation show the guest VM as running.
  
• However, the VM cannot be accessed through VMware Workstation itself; the VM tab remains black.
  
• After logging off from the host user account, the guest VM continues running.
  
• The guest VM can still be accessed remotely, for example via TeamViewer.
  
  

The “foreground” option is the one I would normally prefer to use.
However, if the guest VM is powered off whenever I sign out of the host user account, this does not seem to match what I expected from Vimarun.

Using the “background” option feels almost the same as starting the guest with vmrun using the nogui option through a scheduled task.

Am I doing something wrong, or is this expected behavior?

[wila]

Hi,

Thank you for your report.

I just ran the foreground test down here with Vimarun disabled and Workstation's "keep the VM running" checkbox checked.
Can confirm that having a VM running in the foreground and subsequently logging off does stop the VM. In my case it suspended the VM, not shut it down.

Is this expected behavior? I guess so as Vimarun does not currently handle log off situations, it only acts on shut down.
That does not mean this use case can't be added, but I do need some time before I can look into that. 

It is VMware Workstation here that is initiating the suspend/shutdown and it would be nice if the VM would continue to run in the background. Note that vimarun would not be able to stop the suspend/shutdown, but it could check for the suspend/shut down status after the log off and resume/start up the VM in the background.

This also means that vimarun should then bring the VM from the background back to the foreground on logging in.

--
Wil