Where is my VMWare host computer?

Introduction

We have about 40 server class computers spread around in our offices. Some machines have name tags, some don't. These machines serve as our VMWare host computers running hundreds of vms. We connect to the virtual machines via Remote Desktop (RDP). It happens that we loose track where (on which host) some of our vms are deployed. This evening the president of our company visited my office and asked me to hunt down the host computer of a virtual machine that he was working on.

Figure 1: Which computer is hosting my virtual machine?

Some ideas

I started with the obvious.

• Send an email to everybody and ask whether anybody knows about the machine called "TheLostVM" and where its host is. In my case I got one reply. It said that the president of our company is using this vm. This didn't get me very far.
• Search the hosts computers that I have access to and look like they could be hosting lost vms. No luck with this one either.
• Google for an answer to the question: How can I find out via the guest virtual machine on which physical machine the guest is running on? All I found wasn't very helpful. Most of the information in the cloud required an initial configuration on the host and the vm's configuration vmx file. Catch22. One article that Google dug up got me thinking in the right direction: What hardware are guest and host sharing?

My solution

Of course the DVD drive that guest and host are sharing is the solution to my dilemma.

Figure 2: Eject DVD drive from guest

In the default configuration of a virtual machine using VMWare Workstation the virtual DVD drive is automatically connected to the hosts physical DVD drive. Calling Eject in the Windows Explorer of the guest OS, will trigger the ejection of the physical tray of the host's DVD player. I clicked eject and I heard a click in the computer lab. I just needed to find the computer with the open DVD tray and Bingo! I found it. Case closed.

Ausblick

A few days ago a colleague recommended to not automatically connect the DVD drive of the guest to the host's physical drive at startup of the guest OS. He said this would speed up the boot process. After my experience this night I changed the settings back to the default values and I am going to keep it this way in the future. The DVD drive is the only hope to find a vm's physical host computer.