How to Automatically Start a Virtual Machine (VM) with Windows startup

Learn how to add a virtual machine to your Windows 10 startup, which is useful for starting your critical services and applications hosted in VMWare Workstation platform.

Command used in the video (Replace VMX file path with the one from the desired VM

"C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Workstation\vmrun.exe" start "C:\Users\elastic\Documents\Virtual Machines\Docker\Docker.vmx" 

For service VMs that don’t need to appear on the screen (Run in the background) just add “nogui” as follows:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Workstation\vmrun.exe" start "C:\Users\elastic\Documents\Virtual Machines\Docker\Docker.vmx" nogui 

Alternative method to placing bat file in shell:startup is to run the bat file using Windows Task Scheduler, benefit of this method you can edit task properties and allow the command to run regardless ig you log in to Windows or not – very useful for DNS servers/AD Farms to work immediately on computer startup.