Void Studios

Sewing a lot of intranet applications at the NGO, i found it a must to work around electricity blackouts .. and there is a plenty down there ..

So, i managed to get the server starting-up when electricity is back .. using a BIOS setting that lies there in almost all the modern Motherboards nowadays..

But came to the bigger problem, running the machine on windows start ..

This could be easy if you’re the only user of your machine, with no password, having the automatic log-on in effect .. but if you are on a server where you have to enter a password to log-on , this would be kinda clingy ..

Googling alittle, i found a utility which can be used to run windows application as services , and set to start on windows boot rather user log-on .. It’s called FireDaemon [ Download it HERE, or Google it ] ..

I started installing Firedaemon .. opened the GUI afterwords, it looks like this :

Then i began creating a new service, specifying VMWare main executable ( vmware.exe ) as the server application, and ( -x “Drive:\Path\to\VM\machine.vmx” ) as the parameter, as you can see in the picture :

Voila! Close FireDaemon, and restart your computer to make sure everything is OK.

UPDATE on 18/02/2010 : Use the internal built-in tool vmrun.exe to achieve better results, and to remove the nagging screen of Interactive Services message. Check out the updated post.