Adding Offline Virtual Machines That Reside On Workstations

Some virtual machines may reside on individual workstations. Any machine using VMware Workstation software is capable of supporting a virtual machine. The virtual machines may reside almost anywhere, including hard drives, network drives, jump drives, etc. You use the Workstation Virtual Machines tab to add these stand-alone offline virtual machines to a machine group.

This tab is used to specify the offline identity of each virtual machine. If a virtual machine added here is online when a scan is performed, a mounting error will occur and the scan of that machine will fail.

TIP: If you want to be absolutely sure that all your virtual machines are successfully scanned, simply add the same machines to the group a second time using one of the other tabs (Machine Name, Domain Name, or IP Address/Range). This duplication assures that each virtual machine will be successfully scanned regardless of its power state (online or offline).

The virtual machines specified here are the actual images and you must therefore specify the full path name. Once the virtual machine is added to a machine group you should also specify the credentials used to connect to that virtual machine. This is different from virtual machines hosted by a server. On a server you can simply reference a file that points to the actual virtual machine, letting the server manage the path and credential information.

Adding a virtual machine residing on a workstation

There are two ways to add an offline virtual machine that is hosted on a workstation:

  • In the Enter the full path to a VM file box, type the full path name of the virtual machine. You must specify the full path name and not just the name of the virtual machine. The name must contain a valid image extension (such as .vmx) and must not contain any illegal characters (such as @, ", etc.). When possible, avoid using network drive letters; the recommended practice is to instead specify the Uniform Naming Convention (UNC) path. For example: \\machinename\sharename\directory\machine.vmx.

    • - OR -

  • Click the Browse button () and locate the virtual machine by browsing your local machine and your network for the desired file.

Once the virtual machine is defined, click Add VM to add it to the machine group list.

Adding a directory of virtual machines

There are two ways to add a directory of offline virtual machines:

  • In the Enter the path to a directory of VMs box, type the full path name of the directory. When possible, avoid using network drive letters. The recommended practice is to specify the Uniform Naming Convention (UNC) path. For example: \\virtual\directory\.

    • - OR -

  • Click the Browse button () and locate the directory by browsing your local machine and your network for the desired directory.

If you want the program to recursively search all subdirectories for virtual machines when performing a scan, enable the Include all VMs in all subdirectories check box.

Once the directory is defined, click Add directory to add it to the machine group list.

Adding a large number of virtual machines that are all hosted on the same workstation could cause a connection limit error to occur when scanning the virtual machines. See Notes About Virtual Machines for more information.

Import from file (offline VMs)

You can import a list of offline virtual machines from a previously created text file.

  1. Click Import from file (offline VMs).
  2. Navigate to the location of the text file and then click Open.

The text file can be created manually or it can be created using any network-based tool available to you. When creating the text file, each virtual machine name must be separated by either a carriage return or a comma. For example:

D:\VMware Images\VM-MAF-FR-XPP\winXPPro.vmx, D:\VMware Images\VM-QA-EN-2KS-4\win2000Serv.vmx, Z:\VMware Images\WinXP_EN_gold_2\winXPPro.vmx

Import from file (offline VM directories)

You can import a list of virtual machine directories from a previously created text file.

  1. Click Import from file (offline VM directories).
  2. Navigate to the location of the text file and then click Open.

The text file can be created manually or it can be created using any network-based tool available to you. When creating the text file, each directory name must be separated by either a comma or a carriage return. For example:

D:\VMware Images\VM-MAF-FR-XPP, D:\VMware Images\VM-QA-EN-2KS-4

Z:\VMware Images\WinXP_EN_gold_2

Link to file (offline VMs) and Link to file (offline VM directories)

Offline virtual machines and virtual machine directories can be dynamically linked to a text file rather than imported. Linking a file to a machine group is different than importing its contents. Importing contents is a one-time operation after which the information from the file becomes a part of the machine group. When you link a file to a machine group, any changes that you make to the file are automatically reflected in the next scan. See Linking Files to Machine Groups for more information.