VMware Workstation: scripting unity mode

When trying to keep a whole bunch of legacy programs running at a case appointed to me, it was necessary to use Windows 7 running in a virtual machine under VMware Workstation (running on Windows 10). To prevent the VM's of staying on after the program execution finished, I wrote a small batch file on the virtualization host to start and suspend the VM:

@echo off
cd C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Workstation

vmrun start C:\VMs\Win7\Win7.vmx

vmrun -T ws -gu -gp runProgramInGuest C:\VMs\Win7\Win7.vmx -activeWindow -interactive "C:\Program Files\MyLegacyApp\Legacy.exe"

vmrun suspend C:\VMs\Win7\Win7.vmx

This works fine, since the vmrun "runProgramInGuest" runs synchronously, only terminating after the application inside the guest VM has finished -- which then nicely calls a "suspend" to freeze the VM for the next time the batch file is called on the host.

However, to improve even further the user experience, I wanted to use VMware Workstation's unity feature. That turned out to be more difficult in my setting than I had expected: whether Unity was used the last time in the VM or not, the script above always opens the VMware Workstation GUI and just shows the VM starting. I also read about adding the following lines to the VMX file:

gui.fullScreenAtPowerOn = "FALSE"

gui.lastPoweredViewMode = "unity"

gui.viewModeAtPowerOn = "unity"

Yet that didn't work either... 

So instead, I decide to use a workaround that does both the scripted & synchronous execution of the program I need in the guest, and enables Unity at the same time:

• I run a dummy program in "Unity" which puts the (running) VM in Unity view mode -- notice that vmware-unity-helper.exe works asynchronously, hence immediately returns.
• Afterwards, I start the Legacy.exe using vmrun.

To complicate matters further, also multiple users have to be able to run the program in the same Workstation VM, so some "preconfiguration" for Unity is required for every user.

In a nutshell:

• vmware-unity-helper.exe on Windows seems to only run predefined commands on predefined VMs. The configuration is under %LOCALAPPDATA%\VMware\unity-helper.xml.
• This file looks (in my case) as follows:
  
  <unity_helper version="1">
    <ghilaunch>
      <apps nextid="3">
        <app id="1" uri="file:///d:/dummy.lnk">
      </apps>
      <vms nextid="2">
        <vm id="1" path="C:\VMs\Win7\Win7.vmx">
      </vms>
    </ghilaunch>
  </unity_helper>
• You can see in the XML file:
• First, all applications that Unity can start are defined using an App ID and the URI on where the file is located.
• Then, a list of all known VMs is provided, with the path to the VMX file.
• An application is then started with vmware-unity-helper.exe as follows:
  
  vmware-unity-helper.exe -r -G:1 -V:1
  
  where the "G" parameter specifies the app ID and the V parameter the VM ID.

So in order to have any user utilize Unity, I modified the script above as follows:

@echo off

C:

cd C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Workstation

REM Prepare unity

copy /Y C:\VMs\unity-helper.xml %LOCALAPPDATA%\VMware\unity-helper.xml >NUL

REM Start VM

vmrun start C:\VMs\Win7\Win7.vmx nogui

REM Now run application 

vmware-unity-helper.exe -r -G:1 -V:1

vmrun -T ws -gu Adobe -gp adobe runProgramInGuest C:\VMs\Win7\Win7.vmx -activeWindow -interactive "D:\Program Files\MyLegacyApp\Legacy.exe"

REM Now suspend VM

vmrun suspend C:\VMs\Win7\Win7.vmx

This script:

1. First copies the predefined XML file to the %LOCALAPPDATA% folder (overwriting anything there -- my users don't use Unity for other purposes, so if you need to support that too you'll need to do some more magic).
2. Then we start the VM as before
3. Next step is to run "a dummy application" using Unity, which sets the already running VM in Unity mode. More on this dummy application in a second.
4. Then we starts the application again using vmrun, wait for it to end, and nicely close the VM as before.

The dummy application inside the VM is just a batch file "dummy.bat" with contents "@echo off" and "exit". I created a shortcut "dummy.lnk" to this "dummy.bat" so I can keep the command prompt window minimized (properties of shortcut) -- this prevents a unity window popping up & disappearing into view.

This works great and runs the application in Unity, nicely starting & stopping the VM as needed. Obviously the script should be extended to check if the VM is already running by another user, but that'll be for another time :). The only disadvantage is that you briefly still see the VMware Workstation window -- unfortunately using the "nogui" option with vmrun start does not seem to fix this...

As a sidenote, to top it of I:

• Enabled "Shared Files" to make available the data directories of the users to the users under the guest OS, under a mapped network drive.
• I disabled all unnecessary services in the VM for a very fast startup.
• I've hidden all disk drives (C:, D:, E:) in the guest VM using group policy (https://support.microsoft.com/kb/231289) - to ensure the users can only see the "Shared Folders" and never mistakenly save data inside the guest.
• The VM was located on a SSD disk so the Windows 7 in the guest starts incredibly fast 

Erratic mouse movement in VMware Workstation on a second screen

I heavily rely on VMware workstation for running all flavours of OS's (from Linux to older Windows versions, and there might even be a MacOSX for iOS development running somewhere, maybe). After upgrading to Windows 10 on my new laptop (with a 1080p screen compared to the previous device I was using), I noticed that all of my machines were behaving strange, to the point that basically none of them were useful anymore.

Symptoms:

• Mouse pointer "flickers" around the screen, when clicking/dragging, the mouse pointer jumps to the upper left corner.
• This only happens when VMware Workstation is running on the second screen attached to the computer, not on the native screen.
• It happens on ALL operating systems, Linux, Windows, and perhaps also on Mac OS X.

Been looking around a bit to found out what was causing this behaviour, and it turns out that it is a generic problem with Workstation itself.

Resolution:

Thank you VMware forums, the solution is to disable "Display scaling on high DPI settings" on the vmware.exe in the C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Workstation folder. 

One of those issues that can drive you crazy, have you reinstalling your VM's a dozen of times thinking it is you doing something wrong, etc etc... so hope it helps :).

Removing OneDrive from Windows Explorer in Windows 10 TP

I've been using Windows 10 Technical Preview for a few months already, and installed the latest build 9926 a few days ago. Since I hardly use OneDrive (but instead a combination of... DropBox, Google Drive and my own OwnCloud), I prefer not to have it visibly polluting my Explorer windows.

In Windows 8.1, there was plenty of documentation on what registry keys to modify in order to hide OneDrive from explorer, see for example here. Unfortunately, the class ID for OneDrive changed in Windows 10 -- use the following registry location instead:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{018D5C66-4533-4307-9B53-224DE2ED1FE6}\ShellFolder

As described in the original EightForums article, set the "Attributes" key to f090004d. I've also discovered that in Windows 10 it is not necessary to perform the "64-bit" actions (no similar key exists under the Wow6432Node).

That already visually removes OneDrive. Next up, make sure it doesn't start again by modifying the "OneDrive" application settings. As back in the pre-Windows 8.1 era, OneDrive can again be disabled by rightclicking the OneDrive icon in the notification area, going to settings and disabling...

Finally, don't forget to enable "Save to Computer by default" in the various Office applications to prevent Office of trying to find that OneDrive folder again...

Et voila, at least in this Technical Preview OneDrive can be circumvented this way. No guarantees whether this will still be the case in future TP's or the RTM version of Windows 10 though...

Please note that this does have an impact on functionality, as Microsoft still has big plans to use OneDrive as to share data & settings across the entire Windows 10 platform - read Paul Thurrott's view on it here.