Ny possibility to get VMWARE HOST computer name from GUEST workstation without changing things on HOST?

vmwarevmware-workstation

Let's suppose I have VMWARE workstation (guesting Windows and hosted by Windows).
Is there any possible way to receive host name of hosting machine?
And without changing things on host machine like in this link.

Best Answer

I do this by passing a string from host to guest via machine.id. It does require making a change on the host (in every VM's .vmx file, too), and it doesn't automatically discover the host's hostname, but it works. On the host, with the VM in question powered down, edit the .vmx file for the VM. Find or add a line that looks like:

machine.id = "<string>"

Set <string> equal to some identifying string that will tell you the name of the server. This could be the hostname, or it could be a shortened version of it, or even some unintelligible code if you prefer, as long as you know what it means. If, however, the .vmx file has a line that sets

isolation.tools.machine.id.get.disable = TRUE

passing a string won't work, so if this line is present you might want to either remove/comment it or set the value to FALSE.

On the guest OS, if you have VMware Tools installed, you can then do this (for Linux guests):

vmware-guestd --cmd 'machine.id.get'

or (for Windows guests, which I haven't tried):

VMwareService --cmd machine.id.get
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