Get commandline tools working for VMPlayer
VMWare makes a good free product with the Player application, it’s a component on the larger Workstation system. For remote usage, I’ve always had VIX, their CLI API to start and stop VM’s remotely. With the coming of Workstation-Player 15.03 (actually I think a few before this). VIX stopped working. VIX 1.17 was the latest to work and it ended with Player 14.1.2 https://communities.vmware.com/thread/597920
There is a work around because VIX 1.17 is only missing the Player 15 specific binaries to interact with VIX. Hence the Workstation-Pro 15 can be installed, the binaries extracted and then Player 15 can be installed, binaries injected, and registered in the VIX wrapper file.
#install Workstation 15.0.3
chmod u+x VMware-Workstation-Full-15.0.3-12422535.x86_64.bundle
sudo ./VMware-Workstation-Full-15.0.3-12422535.x86_64.bundle
cd /usr/lib/vmware-vix/
tar -cxvf patch-vix.tar.gz ./Workstation-15.0.0
cp patch-vix.tar.gz /tmp/
#uninstall Workstation
sudo vmware-installer --uninstall-product=vmware-workstation#install Player 15.0.3 and VIX 1.17
chmod u+x VMware-Player-15.0.3-12422535.x86_64.bundle
sudo ./VMware-Player-15.0.3-12422535.x86_64.bundle
chmod u+x VMware-VIX-1.17.0-6661328.x86_64.bundle
sudo ./VMware-VIX-1.17.0-6661328.x86_64.bundle
#inject the v15 binaries
tar -xzvf vix-patch.tar.gz --directory /usr/lib/vmware-vix/
#register the addtional binaries with VIX
cat <<EOF >>/usr/lib/vmware-vix/vixwrapper-config.txt
# Workstation 15.0.3
ws 19 vmdb 15.0.3 Workstation-15.0.0
player 19 vmdb 15.0.3 Workstation-15.0.0
EOF
#edit: a reader has recommended the following command to
#facilitaite running post install due to an errror he had:
ldd /usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmplayer
# Now starting/stopping a VM (eg headless) is now possible:
vmrun -T player start /vms/myvm.vmx gui &
vmrun and other commands useful for snapshots etc should now be available.
However long term I hope more vm’s get distributed in the Qcow2 format as KVM/QEMU
is a preferred platform for Linux users.