I am at a loss on how to use the VIX api or vmrun.exe to run programs in the guest OS. I see proofs of concepts, but never have seen any signifcant, real-life, business case example of this working. I have been through every.VIX api.resource.available.
Here are my operations at a high level:
UAC is off on host and guest machine. my user is Administrator. The result of running this command is that I can use listProcessesInGuest and see some new processes running under this username:
pid=2984, owner=MYDOMAIN\test, cmd="C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe" "C:\Users\test\AppData\Local\Temp\vixScript0"
pid=2992, owner=MYDOMAIN\test, cmd=\??\C:\Windows\system32\conhost.exe "-262616372-801187394105077478520761067478199601-1762539247384719877-515260550
the above is the farthest I can get. runProgramInGuest doesn't even get me this far however...I wouldn't even see the process get kicked off.
I have accomplished this goald with virtual box in the past. I moved toward VMWare and find it a much much better product. However this API seems a little more difficult to work.
I also raised a similar version of this problem here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12335148/unable-to-use-vix-api-to-power-on-vm-install-software-with-msiexec-then-create