2018-11

Continuing my series on provisioning VMs on workstation pro outside of the GUI, I’ve got a functional script that will create a linked clone using the vmrun command.

It allows you to specify the following options on the command line:

After posting yesterday about modifying the parent image to allow for hostname changes, I was still looking for something a little more streamlined. I remember reading about the new REST API that is available on workstation, so I wrote a little script to use the Workstation API to clone a VM.

I’ve been brushing up on a few technologies in my home lab, and have found myself using VMware workstation for some simple tasks that don’t require a whole virtualized environment. Workstation didn’t set the hostname of my Ubuntu 18.xx VMs properly after they booted. Maybe I’m a little spoiled by guest OS customization or missing something, but either way, I needed a way to quickly spin up a whole VM and have it’s hostname set correctly. It’s definitely not the cleanest, and I realize I would be better off using the Workstation Pro REST API, but I’m not there yet.