Vmplayer

VMware Player

Vmplayer is the executable that runs the VMware Player program on the hosted Windows and Linux platforms.

Command line options

You can start the player with command line options so that it starts with a certain feature that you want to use.

Syntax:

vmplayer [options] /path/to/vmx

Options:

-?, --help              : display supported options
-v, --version           : display the version of vmware player used
-L, --list-stock-ids    : display the list of registered VMs
-X, --fullscreen        : Start player with the supplied VM in full screen  mode
-U, --unity             : Start with unity enabled
-k, --no-kiosk-warning  : Start an ACE VM without warning
-K, --no-kiosk-mode     : Start a kiosk mode ACE VM outside of kiosk mode
-h <host>               : (unsupported) hostname or IP on an remote machine (can be running ESX or VMware Server!) 
-u <name>               : (unsupported) username to login at the remote host
-p <pass>               : (unsupported) password to login with at the remote host

The unsupported -h option works best on the linux vmware player, when using windows you MUST also supply the VM to run. On linux if you do not supply a VM, it will present you with a dialog to select the virtual machine from. When trying to access a VM hosted at a VMware Server host, you have to add the :8333 port to the ip or hostname.

Examples:

Connect to a remote ESX/ESXi host using player on IP address 10.10.10.10 and select a windows 2003 VM on the datastore1 storage.

vmplayer  -h 10.10.10.10 -u "root" -p "password" "[datastore1] W2k3en/W2k3en.vmx"