Parallel Ports on a PCI card do not work

Products

• VMware Desktop Hypervisor

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• You are unable to use parallel ports on a PCI card with virtual machines in VMware Workstation and VMware Player.
• You cannot use a device attached to a parallel port on a PCI card.
• You see one of these errors:
   
  • Virtual device parallel0 will start disconnected.
  • Cannot open VMparport driver for LPT1: The operation completed successfully. Failed to connect virtual device Parallel0.

Environment

VMware Workstation Player 14.x (Linux)
VMware Workstation 7.x (Windows)
VMware Workstation Pro 15.x (Windows)
VMware Workstation Player 15.x (Linux)
VMware Workstation Pro 14.x (for Windows)
VMware Workstation 6.x (Linux)
VMware Workstation 10.x (Windows)
VMware Workstation 10.x (Linux)
VMware Workstation Pro 15.x (Linux)
VMware Workstation Pro 14.x (for Linux)
VMware Workstation 8.x (Windows)
VMware Workstation Player 14.x (Windows)
VMware Player Pro 7.x (Windows)
VMware Workstation 8.x (Linux)
VMware Workstation 11.x (for Windows)
VMware Workstation 9.x (Linux)
VMware Workstation Player 15.x (Windows)
VMware Workstation 5.x (Linux)
VMware Player 7.x (Windows)
VMware Workstation 5.x (Windows)
VMware Workstation 7.x (Linux)
VMware Workstation Player 12.x (Windows)
VMware Player 6.x (Linux)
VMware Player 5.x (Linux)
VMware Workstation 6.x (Windows)
VMware Workstation 9.x (Windows)
VMware Player 5.x (Windows)
VMware Player Pro 7.x (Linux)
VMware Player 6.x (Windows)
VMware Workstation Player 12.x (Linux)
VMware Player 7.x (Linux)
VMware Workstation 11.x (for Linux)

Resolution

VMware Workstation and VMware Player do not support PCI parallel port cards. Therefore, a parallel port on a PCI card cannot be mapped to a Guest operating system running in a virtual machine.