How to get clipboard working for shared VMs on VMWare Workstation

9

You can connect to shared VMs running on VMWare Workstation 8 if you configured your VMWare correctly. Host and client are both Windows 7.

One disadvantage of shared VMs is: The clipboard feature gets disabled for security reasons.
I don't care about security in this case. There are no sensitive data.

Is there a workaround or a trick to re-enable the clipboard for shared VMs?

What I've tried

I added the following parameters to my VMX file as it's suggested for VMWare vSphere.
But it doesn't work for VMWare Workstation. (VMWare tools is installed)

isolation.tools.copy.disable = "FALSE"
isolation.tools.paste.disable = "FALSE"

Can anyone help?

nixda

Posted 2014-02-12T17:38:38.953

Reputation: 23 233

Did you ever discover a fix for this? Just came across this problem myself. – Index – 2015-01-22T14:44:56.373

@KGChristensen No, sadly. – nixda – 2015-01-22T17:23:10.020

Does it works to share clipboard between host OS and guest OS, installing Guest Addition (probably setting bidirectional and restarting them)? If needed give a look to this answer and its references

– Hastur – 2015-09-07T12:19:20.167

Answers

0

  1. Have you installed VMware Tools on the guest vm?

  2. Does other VMware Tools functionality appear to be working?

    • Can you - when your VM is in windowed mode - drag and drop a file from your host onto the problem VM?
    • Can you confirm there are two 'vmwaretoolsd' tasks running in the Windows Task Manager? One for SYSTEM user, one for your current user? You may need to click 'show tasks for all users'.

  3. Is there any antivirus software running on the guest vm? If so, can you disable it and test again?

DevOps Dan

Posted 2014-02-12T17:38:38.953

Reputation: 334

Asked: 2014-02-12T17:38:38.953

Viewed: 9 711 times

Active: 2019-12-19T09:01:45.310