If you used Windows 7 or you are using now Windows 10 and VMWare Workstation/Player with a Linux guest you may encounter the very prevalent issue when clipboard sharing suddenly stops working (between the host and guest). Stops - it means sharing clipboard has been turned on in VM settings and usually it works when VM is newly started but it stops somehow when you use your computer for extender period of time, especially if you use sleep/hibernation.

 

About this issue

If you sleep/hibernate your laptop, you may go to fullscreen mode with a game, then the issue sometimes may appear. In such case, if you copy something to the host’s clipboard, the guest’s clipboard can’t see it (and vice versa). This is especially annoying as the clipboard is very useful in every day’s task (I suppose not only for me).

 

Unfortunately this issue is very well known among community and affects many previous versions of VMware Workstation/Player:

 

There are many, many more threads like these. Some of them were marked as Solved but I think most of these solutions don’t solve this problem or at least solve until next time.

This is a definitely a some kind of VMware Workstation/Player bug and needs to be solved by VMware ultimately. But because they still haven’t solved it this is the reason why I’ve written this post.

 

Solution (for Linux based VMs)

Don’t even bother option “Guest Isolation” with VM settings, I know this is already enabled in your hypervisor.

Don’t shutdown guest or host, it’s not needed here. The workaround is very simple.

If you use your Linux VM, you probably should have VMware Tools already installed, in most distributions that may be open-vm-tools or something very similar. Such service is needed by VM to “see” shared folders, “detect” abd adapt to new resolutions (when you resize window of VMware Workstation) and share clipboard exactly.

When clipboards sharing stops working, basically nothing bad is happening on my machine as open-vm-tools is still working correctly - screen resizing and shared folders works correctly.

 

The simplest solution to make it working again is restart open-vm-tools:

# systemctl restart vmtoolsd.service

This is for Manjaro/Archlinux (for other linux distribution guests check correct service name). That may help instantly without any restarts.

If it does not help then try the last resort solution (my own name), run this command from your VM linux user:

$ vmware-user-suid-wrapper &

this command you may enter to the cron and run every 5 minutes if you experience this issue many times during a day.

 

If this solution was helpful for you, feel free to let me know in the comment section down below.