Important

Guest to guest communications are deprecated and will be removed in the next major release.

For two virtual machines to communicate, you must enable VMCI on both guest virtual machines, from either the user interface or the vSphere API.

For VMware Workstation, select VM > Settings > Options > Guest Isolation > Enable VMCI.

For ESX/ESXi using the vSphere Client, click the VMCI device property Enable VMCI Between VMs. This is the same as setting the virtual machine VMCI device to allowUnrestrictedCommunication in the vSphere API. This setting takes effect when a virtual machine is restarted.

On Windows when the VMCI device is added, it has very restrictive administrator-only permissions, so regular users cannot access the device and use VMCI Sockets. In the beta 2 and RC 1 releases, on Windows XP you must run VMCI Sockets applications as a member of the Administrator group. On Windows Vista with UAC (user account control) enabled, even a regular administrator has a restricted token and must elevate.

In the Workstation 6.5 beta 2 release, any 64-bit applications that use the VMCI Sockets interface will fail on a 64-bit Windows system, but 32-bit applications work in emulation mode under Windows on Windows 64-bit (WoW64). In the Server 2.0 RC1 release, support for Windows 64-bit systems is not installed, so even WoW64 emulation does not work.

The VMware HGFS (host guest file system) could be re-implemented more efficiently with VMCI Sockets and datagrams, but this work has not been done yet.

VMware Tools or another installer places the vmci_sockets.h include file in one of the following locations:

Windows guests on Workstation 8.0 or later, and Windows hosts of Workstation 8.0 or later – C:\Program Files\Common Files\VMware\Drivers\vmci\sockets\include

earlier Windows guests – C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Tools\VSock SDK\include

earlier Windows hosts – C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Workstation

Linux guests – /usr/lib/vmware-tools/include/vmci

Linux hosts – /usr/lib/vmware/include/vmci

ESX/ESXi hosts – Not installed on the system.