Fusion: create “headless” virtual machines?

Question

Is there a way to run a VM in Fusion that starts when the machine does, but I can then access via Remote Desktop (Windows) or ssh (Linux) rather than by opening the Fusion app, starting the VM, and then connecting however I'd prefer (rdp/ssh)?

I know this is possible with VMware Server for both Linux and Windows.

Answer 1

I found a couple answers elsewhere.

Quoting from my first source:

1. You may or may not want to add the location of vmrun to your default path. I chose not to as I will mostly be interacting with vmrun through shell scripts.

2. To Launch the virtual machine named VA-LAMP.vmx which is located in the standard virtual machine directory enter the following command into the Terminal app.

/Library/Application\ Support/VMware\ Fusion/vmrun -T fusion start /Users/USERNAME/Documents/Virtual\ Machines.localized/VA-LAMP.vmwarevm/VA-LAMP.vmx nogui

To make this a command to launch the headless terminal from a file on the desktop just open text edit and enter the following text

#!/bin/bash /Library/Application\ Support/VMware\ Fusion/vmrun -T fusion start /Users/USERNAME/Documents/Virtual\ Machines.localized/VA-LAMP.vmwarevm/VA-LAMP.vmx nogui

Save the file as plain text to the desktop as headless.command

Now to make it executable fire up the terminal application and type

chmod +x $HOME/Desktop/headless.command

And the second:

To enable it you need to run the following on your console: defaults write com.vmware.fusion fluxCapacitor -bool YES