Copy Paste between two environments

I wanted to copy paste something from my laptop which is in the production domain to a VM in the staging environment. I found out it wasn’t that easy. Instead of using notepad and deployment servers I decided to dig in to it. Just because I knew it’s possible. 

It turns out that VMware disabled the copy and paste functionality by default since vSphere version 4.1 because of security measures. To re-enable it you have to undertake the steps below. Just keep in mind that if an option is grayed-out it eighter means the VM need to be shut down or you don’t have enough admin rights.

 

1. Log in to vSphere Client and select the virtual machine in the inventory.
2. The configuration page for this virtual machine appears with the Summary tab displayed.
3. Power off the virtual machine.
4. Right-click the virtual machine and click Edit Settings.
5. Click Options >> Advanced >> General >> Configuration Parameters.
6. Click Add row.
7. Type isolation.tools.copy.disable in the Name field and false into the Value column.
8. Type isolation.tools.paste.disable in the Name field and false into the Value column.
9. Power on the virtual machine