Fusion 2 and vmrun

VMware Fusion 2 and other VMware products include a command line utility called "vmrun". On OS X, you'll find that at "/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion". You can download a PDF that describes its use at http://www.vmw.com/ beta/fusion/vmrunCommand.pdf.

If you want a great guide to learning Fusion, consider Joe Kissel's Take Control of VMware Fusion 2, a $10.00 PDF E-book that will teach you everything you need to know.

You can use vmrun to start and stop virtual machines from the command line. You can suspend and reset machines also. That's all very simple:

vmrun start Ubuntu/Ubuntu.vmx 
vmrun  suspend Ubuntu/Ubuntu.vmx
vmrun start Ubuntu/Ubuntu.vmx
vmrun stop Ubuntu/Ubuntu.vmx

What may be more interesting is that you can inspect the process list. You do need to install VMware tools first:

$ vmrun -gu apl -gp mypasswd  listProcessesInGuest  Ubuntu.vmx 
(long delay)
Error: The VMware Tools are not running in the virtual 
machine: /Volumes/WD250/Ubuntu.vmwarevm/Ubuntu.vmx
 

Although VMware provides VMware Tools, Fusion can't actually install them - it simply mounts a virtual CD image and you do a manual install. For Ubuntu, that involves unpacking and compiling source, some of which failed when I tried it. However, most of the important things did compile and were able to be linked into the kernel so soon I could do:

$ vmrun -gu apl -gp mypasswd  listProcessesInGuest  Ubuntu.vmx 
Process list: 69
pid=1, owner=root, cmd=/sbin/init
pid=914, owner=root, cmd=/sbin/udevd --daemon
pid=2231, owner=root, cmd=/sbin/getty 38400 tty4
pid=2232, owner=root, cmd=/sbin/getty 38400 tty5
pid=2238, owner=root, cmd=/sbin/getty 38400 tty2
pid=2239, owner=root, cmd=/sbin/getty 38400 tty3
pid=2244, owner=root, cmd=/sbin/getty 38400 tty6
..
 

You can do the same thing with a Windows VM.

I did have one other problem with the tools: it reset my X display to 1366x768 . That was impossible to read, so I did a Ctrl-Alt-F1 to get a login screen, edited /etc/X11/xorg.conf and did a "killall Xorg" to fix that.

There's more: you can create directories in a running Vm:

vmrun -gu apl -gp mypasswd  createDirectoryInGuest  ~/Desktop/Ubu*/Ubuntu.vmx /tmp/newdir
 

You can even run programs. That's not particularly exciting for Linux as you could do that several easier ways, but it could be interesting for Windows VM's.

Not that when you run programs, the output doesn't appear at your Mac. In the case of Linux, the output doesn't appear anywhere unless you have told the command to put its output somewhere. A script could redirect to /dev/tty1, an X11 app could use Display :0 and so on.

On Windows, the commands run in the VM console if you use the credentials of the logged in user.

I had a lot of trouble with running programs and scripts. I could easily run a script that I had created, say "/tmp/myscript":

date > /dev/tty1
date > /tmp/foo
echo $1 >> /tmp/foo
 

That would run with

vmrun -gu apl -gp mypasswd  runprogramInGuest  ~/Desktop/Ubu*/Ubuntu.vmx /tmp/myscript  args
 

If you were logged in on tty1 (ctrl-alt-F1) you'd see the output and of course would also find it in /tmp/foo.

However, I had problems running Perl scripts such as they show in examples. There doesn't appear to be any logging so it's very hard to figure out what might be wrong.. but it hardly matters as you can always just bundle up whatever you need in another script.

Vmrun makes it possible to automate tasks in virtual machines. I don't have any particular need for that right now, but it's easy to imagine cases where I would.

Take Control of Maintaining Your Mac

Take Control of Syncing Data in Leopard

Take Control of Upgrading to Snow Leopard

Macworld Total Snow Leopard Superguide

Jump to Comments

Many of the products and books I review are things I purchased for my own use. Some were given to me specifically for the purpose of reviewing them. I resell or can earn commissions from the sale of some of these items. Links within these pages may be affiliate links that pay me for referring you to them. That's mostly insignificant amounts of money; whenever it is not I have made my relationship plain. I also may own stock in companies mentioned here. If you have any question, please do feel free to contact me.

Specific links that take you to pages that allow you to purchase the item I reviewed are very likely to pay me a commission. Many of the books I review were given to me by the publishers specifically for the purpose of writing a review. These gifts and referral fees do not affect my opinions; I often give bad reviews anyway.

We use Google third-party advertising companies to serve ads when you visit our website. These companies may use information (not including your name, address, email address, or telephone number) about your visits to this and other websites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services of interest to you. If you would like more information about this practice and to know your choices about not having this information used by these companies, click here.