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Manage Virtual Sound Card in VMware Virtual Machines

By Codrut Nistor

Posted in How-to, Software, Virtualization-2

When administrators use VMware workstation to create a new virtual machine by default the sound card of VM is mapped with the card present in host computer. In earlier days host computers used to have only one sound card present on their computers and therefore there was no need to manage the cards in virtual machines. However nowadays host computers especially laptop PCs support both analog and digital soundcards. In these cases sometimes administrators may want to manage the mapping of virtual sound cards to the physical ones in order to get the maximum and most efficient output from the VMs. As a VMware administrator if you want to manage virtual sound card mappings with the host computers you need to follow the steps given below:

  1. Double click on VMware icon available on the desktop to open the VMware console window.
  2. Make sure that the virtual machine on which you want to manage virtual sound card is powered off.
  3. Right click on the tab of the target virtual machine and from the available menu click on Settings.
  4. On Virtual Machine Settings box in the left pane click on Sound Card and from the right pane choose Specify host sound card radio button.
  5. From the available drop-down list choose the appropriate soundcard as desired.
  6. Click on Ok button to save the changes.