I’ve been looking around ways to auto start my Linux router about few year back when I was using the VMware with Linux as my router. Its been a problem for me to manually start the VMware guest OS after I have waited the host machine to be started then only I can use. That time i’m looking way to auto start it but seem can’t, and lately I’ve downloaded the VMware Server edition and it has the feature to auto start the guest OS when the host machine start.

To enable the auto start, click on the guest OS and click “Edit virtual machine setting” as screen below

Then click on the “Options”, then click on “Startup/shutdown” setting. You can see the setting on the right hand side, where you can select how you want the guest operating system to behave when you power on and power off the host machine.

Source : Vmware