VMCI Sockets Documentation

Community  |  Technical Papers  |  Knowledge Base  |  Downloads

The Virtual Machine Communication Interface (VMCI) supports fast and efficient communication between a guest virtual machine and its host server, or between multiple virtual machines on the same host.

VMCI Sockets 1.0

Released 21 May 2009
First released 23 Sept 2008

The VMCI sockets library provides a communications API similar to Berkeley UNIX sockets and Windows sockets. It is available with ESX/ESXi 4, VMware Workstation 6.5, and VMware Server 2. You can program VMCI sockets using C or C++.

The VMCI Sockets header file is installed with VMware Tools on guest virtual machines, or under the VMware directory on Windows hosts.

Documentation Resources:

Release Notes
VMCI Sockets Programming Guide

Legacy VMCI API

Released 26 May 2008

VMCI was included as an experimental feature with VMware Tools in Workstation 6.0.x, but deprecated with the release of VMCI Sockets. Bindings were provided for C and C++. VMware Tools installed a README and two sample applications.

Documentation Resources:

VMCI API Reference