How to Start & Stop VMware server/Workstation manually

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If you are an IT professional or a developer or even a home user who runs VMWare Server or VMWare workstation to run virtual machines for testing or evaluation of operating Systems or applications and only run VMWare temporarily then you wouldn’t want VMWare to eat up your system resources while you are actually not running any Virtual Machines.

VMWare runs the following services starting them automatically at the system startup. These services consume quite a considerable system resources and sometimes slows down system startup:

VMWare Authorization Service

VMWare DHCP Service

VMWare NAT Service

VMWare Registration Service

VMWare Virtual Mount Manager Extended

An easier and simple solution would be to set these services to manual so it doesn’t start at system startup so when the services start only when you start the VMWare server.

To do so,

1. Click Start - RUN and type “services.msc”

2. In the right pane, right-click all of those services, one at a time and click properties.

3. Change startup mode to “Manual” instead of “Automatic”

 
Now create two batch files, one to start all the services when requried and one to stop all VMWare services when you are finished using VMware. This will allow you to start and stop all VMWare services with one click (well 2 clicks !)

VMSTART.BAT

Copy the following lines onto a text file and save it to your desktop as vmstart.bat

net start “VMWare Authorization Service”
net start “VMWare DHCP Service”
net start “VMWare NAT Service”
net start “VMWare Registration Service”
net start “VMWare Virtual Mount Manager Extended”
“C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Server\vmware.exe

or simply download this file to your PC. VMSTART.BAT

NOTE: Change “Server” in the last line to “Workstation” if you use VMWare workstation.

VMSTOP.BAT

Copy the following lines onto a text file and save it to your desktop as vmstop.bat

net stop “VMWare Registration Service”
net stop “VMWare Authorization Service”
net stop “VMWare DHCP Service”
net stop “VMWare NAT Service”
net stop “VMWare Virtual Mount Manager Extended”

NOTE: Change “Server” in the last line to “Workstation” if you use VMWare workstation.

or simply download this file to your PC. VMSTOP.BAT

This should save you your precious time and your systems precious resources.