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        Virtual Printing in VMWare Workstation 7

Section(s): General
Published on Feb 23, 2010.
Last Modified on Nov 30, 2009.
Last Modified by Chris Sanders.
Rated 1.3 out of 5 based on 4 votes.

One of the previous challenges of operating in a virtual environment is printing. VMWare Workstation 7 introduces virtual printing to help overcome these challenges.

In the past, when you wanted to print from a virtual machine you had to connect it to a network or shared printer just as if it were another network client. This isn’t too big of a headache, but what if you just want to print something to the virtual host without connecting across the network to a printer?

This has previously been impossible, but VMWare has partnered with ThinPrint to make this feature available in Workstation 7. When enabled, this allows for virtual guests to connect and print to the printers installed on the virtual host, without any manual driver installation.

You can configure this feature by viewing the properties of a virtual machine from within VMWare Workstation 7 and going to the Virtual Printer setting. Printers pulled through from the virtual host will have “Printer created by TPAutoConnect” in the printers’ comments.