Communication with a VMWare guest system without network

Question

does anybody know an API that allows to send and receive data to/from a VMWare guest system without using an IP network?

I have to communicate with a program inside a VMWare guest but the guest is not allowed to have an IP network. As file transfers into the VM via Drag&Drop are possible I assume that there is an API - I just need to know if this API is open to 3rd party programmers or if it is only available fro the VMWare Player itself.

Answer 1

It turns out that there is a solution for my problem:

Virtual Serial Port

VM-Ware allows to create virtual serial ports for the guest that are connected on host side to a named pipe.

I therefore created two helper programs, one on host side which listens on a TCP port and a specific named pipe and transfers all the incoming data between them.

A second helper program runs in the guest VM and does the same between the serial port and the TCP port I want to access.

The only draw-back is that the serial speed is limited to 128kBit/sec. May be that can be increased by using multiple virtual serial ports...

Virtual Machine Communication Interface (VMCI)

Using VMCI there is an API for creating a shared memory region that is accessible from both hast and guest system.

Answer 2

Sure, you can access those with the VIX API.

More specificely, the Drag&Drop is implemented with following functions:

• VixVM_CopyFileFromGuestToHost
• VixVM_CopyFileFromHostoGuest

Basically all VixVM functions may be relevant for your tasks. They are all documented in the official VIX API reference.