VMWare Workstation - Shared VMs - Mutiple Save Locations

Question

I have been playing about with VMWare Workstation 10, and would like the Host to act like a server, i.e. I would like it to start the guests on start-up and shut the guests down on host shut-down.

I have been doing some reading and can see the ideal way of doing this is running the Guests as a Shared VM, which is great and will work how I wish. However it appears that you can only select Hard Drive locations that are in the Shared VMs Locations. I was wondering if there was a way to add more locations that Shared VMs can write to, so that the other locations can be saved on different physical drives.

As I will be running multiple guests and some with multiple virtual drives I do not want these all located on the same physical drive due to the speed implications that it will cause and not to mention that this drive will not be big enough on its own!

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Here is example of datastores.xml with one additional location apart from standard one

<ConfigRoot>
  <LocalDatastores>
    <_length>2</_length>
    <_type>hostd.host.LocalDatastoreEntry[]</_type>
    <e id="0">
      <_type>hostd.host.LocalDatastoreEntry</_type>
      <id>1</id>
      <name>standard</name>
      <path>C:\Users\koki\Desktop\VMware_VMs\Shared_VMs</path>
    </e>
    <e id="1">
      <_type>hostd.host.LocalDatastoreEntry</_type>
      <id>2</id>
      <name>E_1TB</name>
      <path>E:\Shared_VMware_VMDK</path>
    </e>
  </LocalDatastores>
  <NasVolumes>
    <_length>0</_length>
    <_type>hostd.host.NasDatastoreEntry[]</_type>
  </NasVolumes>
</ConfigRoot>

Answer 2

Stop the VMware Workstation Service and edit C:\ProgramData\VMware\hostd\datastores.xml to manually add more datastores