iCan't: Share My VMWare Virtual Machine between OSX Users

VMWare 4 Virtual Machine Sharing between Local OS 10.6 Users

One of my Mac to VMware virtual machine users went on maternity leave last week, leaving her equipment open for a temporary replacement consultant to fill in for her. Even though we don’t really like temps or consultants to use any of our equipment in general, I had to build a Snow Leopard user account for the replacement, and giver her access to the pregnant woman’s ( virtual machine. This proved to be a tad more complicated than it sounds.

First, you need to be logged into the original VM’s owner and make sure that the virtual machine is not running or suspended. Then, you need to locate the VM bundle on your Mac. If you don’t know where it is, you can find out by opening the Virtual Machine Library within VMWare, right clicking the virtual machine in question, and clicking “Show in Finder”.

Once you know the location of the file, drag said file into the Shared folder </Users/Shared>. Then, right click to “Get Info” so you can change the “Name & Extension” in order to remove the “.vmwarevm” extension from the end of the file name. You will be prompted to Remove; do so. When this is complete, click the lock icon in the bottom corner of window, enter your administrator password if prompted, and ensure that “Everyone” and “Staff” have Read & Write privileges (under Privileges). You also need to make sure you add any other specific users with the + button to said privileges.

If you hit the “More Actions Button” you will see a selection called “Apply to enclosed Items”. Click Okay. Then add “.vmwarevm” back to the end of the file via the Name & Extensions tab. This should be the end of your sharing shenanigans.

To double check that it took, log out of the main user and into the shared user and attempt to open the virtual machine from the shared folder.

Enjoy!