Controlling VMware Server services

Introduction

The excellent software virtualization tool VMware Server is now available for download at VMware.com, but as it is it's not actually suited for install and use on a standard workstation - in fact neither version, home or professional, of Microsoft Windows XP is officially supported. However, the software runs fine on systems based on these versions of Microsoft Windows, but for developers and people dabbling with virtualization the numerous system services connected with this software do require quite a bit of memory that especially developers and gamers simply can't do without.

Setting startup of services to manual

The solution is as simple as it is evident - in other words simply stopping the services from loading automatically at system boot while still making it possible to use VMware Server without having to manually start all services in the expected order.

What we're going to do to start with is to set all of the relevant services startup to manual, and this is easily done by first clicking on the Start-button followed by using the "Run..."-option to run the command "services.msc". You should now get an overview over all system services, and you can set each of the services startup-mode to manual by first right-clicking each service and selecting properties followed by the actual adjustments.

Make sure you do this for the following list of services:

VMware Authorization Service
VMware Registration Service
VMware DHCP Service
VMware NAT Service
VMware Virtual Mount Manager Extended

Easily starting and stopping the services

In order to use VMware Server you would now ordinarily have to go back to the tool previously used, "services.msc", and starting the services manually, but that frankly seems to be a little too much work to bother with so we're going to make a couple of batch-files to do this for us. The following two sections detail the contents of these files, and in case you're wondering you can simply copy the content and paste them in a text-editor such as Notepad and then saving them with an appropriate name. Using them is simply done by double-clicking on them and letting the computer do the rest.

Contents of "VMware start.bat":

@echo off
echo --- Starting VMware Server services
net start "VMware Authorization Service"
net start "VMware Registration Service"
net start "VMware DHCP Service"
net start "VMware NAT Service"
net start "VMware Virtual Mount Manager Extended"

Contents of "VMware stop.bat"