Hi there! My name is Ivan Versluis. I am a Dutch IT Professional working for Almatis as Global IT Engineering Manager. Did you ever tried to automate the process of having a script or shortcut to automatically start a virtual guest with VMWare Player? After you login you can start VMWare Player and locate the virtual machine or click the recent one but still you need to control this process. Maybe you want to start the virtual machine at system startup with Scheduled Tasks or instruct a user to click on a specific shortcut for a pre-created virtual machine he needs to test.
I created a small script which can used for this process. Create new file in notepad and paste the commands below. Make sure the VMWare Player installation path is correct and the location of your VMWare guest.
@Echo off
REM VMWare Player cmd script for virtual guest startup
REM Ivan Versluis @ Networknet.nl
REM Email: Ivan.Versluis@networknet.nl
REM Date: 29/01/2008
"C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Player\vmplayer.exe" "C:\VMWareGuests\Server\Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition.vmx"
The result 
JM
Thank you for putting this up here. I’ve been looking for it for about an hour, putting a virtual machine on my new image for work and I wanted to make it easier for the employees to get into Windows XP when they need it.
Abdulrahman Dimashki
Thanks for the tip, any success in shutting down the virtual machines when Windows 2008 R2 shuts down?
I think this should be doable using power shell, but I don’t have enough information about that yet.
fraser
where is the start ?????????????????????????
where is the finish?????????????????????????????
do you get an email everytime we switch the computer on ??????????????///
Ari
You made my day
Binsar
The script is ok if you manually click it. But how if you want to fully automatically run the vm? I try put the script on the wind task scheduler, but somehow it not run properly. I mean, that when I ping the vm, it replying, but i cannot open / remote to the machine.
Any other suggestion ?