How to disable display resolution setting through VMware Tools

Products

• VMware Desktop Hypervisor

Issue/Introduction

This article describes how to disable display resolution mode setting through VMware Tools, for VMs running a Windows guest OS.

Environment

VMware Workstation 17.5x

Resolution

Display resolution mode setting through VMware Tools includes topologies set through the UI or client. To disable changing the resolution through tools, set the following VMX configuration option:

guestInfo.svga.wddm.modeset="FALSE"

In order to prevent Windows from setting display modes, it may also be necessary to make changes to the Group Policy settings. For more information, see Microsoft article Group Policy Settings for Display in Control Panel

Note: This option works for VMTools 10.2.5 and above.