Launching VMWare Fusion VMs

Following on from my automation of running the VMWare vSphere Client from my OS X Desktop, it occured to me that it would also be useful to be able to launch VMWare Fusion VMs directly from my desktop -- eg, using Alfred -- without any navigation effort. And particularly to have the VMWare Fusion "Virtual Machine Library" disappear automatically: it auto-opens every time VMware Fusion is launched, with no apparent way to turn it off -- except Single VM mode which does not suit my use case. That way I could, eg, type "ciscovpn" and have my VM for the Cisco VPN Client start, or type "dockervm" and have my VM for running Docker start.

The first part is trivial: VMs can be launched by opening their *.vmwarevm directory, which will bring up VMWare Fusion and "play" that VM -- starting it or resuming it as required. That can be done with open on the command line, or easily in Automator.

The second part is a little bit more complicated. Superuser.com provided the necessary hint to close arbitrary named windows, by using AppleScript to tell a named application to close any windows with a specific name. I have extended the shell wrapper around the AppleScript so it can optionally try to close the window multiple times (at 1 second intervals) to get around race conditions in the timing of the window appearing. The resulting script, closewindow (BSD licensed) makes closing the application window from the command line trivial.

To tie this all together we can use Apple Automatator again:

Open Automator and create an Application
Drag "Get Specified Finder Items" from the Action Library, and then use Finder to find the right VMWare VM directory and drag that onto the action.
Drag "Open Finder Items" from the Action Library below that (I left it set to its "Default Application" setting, which should work for *.vmwarevm directories).
Finally below that drag "Run Shell Script", and have it run:
```
~/.bin/closewindow "VMWare Fusion" "Virtual Machine Library" 3
```
which will make three attempts (with one second between each attempt) to close the "Virtual Machine Library" window. Normally the first or second attempt should work.

Then save that as an application, eg, "ciscovpn", put it in /Application/Wrappers. It should then be possible to invoke Alfred, and type ciscovpn and the Virtual Machine will launch, with the Virtual Machine Library window disappearing quickly.

The result is not perfect (the "Virtual Machine Library" window does still pop up briefly if VMWare Fusion was not already running), but it cleans itself up quickly, so it is much more convenient than doing all the steps by hand.

ETA, 2016-10-24: It turns out that VMware removed AppleScript support in VMware Fusion 7, and it is also not present in VMware Fusion 8/8.5 either. Which means that closewindow does not work. However there is an alternative, which is to use the vmrun command embedded in VMware Fusion -- at least VMware Fusion 8 -- to start the VM, which avoids the "Virtual Machine Library" window appearing at all. Usage is something like:

"/Applications/Purchased/VMware Fusion.app/Contents/Library/vmrun" start /VMDIR/VMNAME.vmx

(at least with the custom location where I put the VMware Fusion.app).