Just a quick, but helpful tip. At work, I have a bunch of virtual machines defined in my VMWare Server, but the Windows VM takes up a lot of resources, so I often turn it off when I'm not directly using it. My problem is that when I restart it, sometimes the IP address has changed, which makes it a pain to remember how to get to it to connect via Remote Desktop. I found vmware-cmd can help with this.

To do this, run 'vmware-cmd -l' to get the listing of configs, then run the following:

$ vmware-cmd "/share/VM/windows/windows.vmx" getguestinfo  ip
getguestinfo(ip) = 192.168.50.4

Note: this appears to require that you have vmware tools installed to function properly.

As you can see, this displays the ip address.

Another not-often mentioned trick with VMWare Server is to not use the console to connect when using Windows. The VMWare console is very resource intensive and is pretty slow. Using Remote Desktop Connection to connect to your Windows desktop is a lot faster.