How to Define Life of Virtual Machines in VMware Workstation

In any production environment where virtual network infrastructure is implemented and security is a major concern administrators may want to define the lifetime of any virtual machine that they create using VMware workstation. This ensures that the virtual machine is not misused anyhow and also that it is discarded when it has served its purpose successfully. Defining lifetime for virtual machines is a unique feature which is offered by VMware workstation however administrators can specify the expiration date of any virtual machine only when ACE feature is enabled for that VM. In VMware administrators can specify the time duration in days after which the virtual machine will expire or they can define the lifetime according to the dates. As an administrator you can define lifetime of a virtual machine by following the steps given below:

1. Open VMware workstation console window and from the appeared box click on the virtual machine in the left Sidebar for which you want to specify the lifetime.

2. Make sure that ACE feature is enabled and from the expanded list click on Edit Policies link.

3. On the opened page choose Expiration from the left pane and from the right pane choose either After or Valid From radio button (as required) and specify the duration. Optionally you can specify the display messages that will be prompted to inform the user about the expiration of the virtual machine.

   

4. Once done click on Ok button to make the changes persistent.