VMware Workstation - Enter Serial Number From Linux CLI

Well, this was a fun exercise. While building out some VMs to execute Packer image builds for vSphere, I installed VMware Workstation via Ansible and forgot to add the serial number as part of the installation. Yes, you read that correct, running Packer builds inside a vSphere VM, within VMware Workstation. All kicked off via GitLab CI pipelines. So, anyways, back to the issue at hand. I needed to enter a functional license key to make Packer happy with VMware Workstation. Well, something that one would think would be relatively easy, was not so much. At least for me. Because there was not a GUI, I had to figure out the CLI command to execute. Google did not provide me with anything very useful, but finally pieced some stuff together which ended up working. So, here it is, the overly complex command:

sudo /usr/lib/vmware/bin/licenseTool enter XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX "" "" 15.0+ "VMware Workstation" /usr/lib/vmware

There is a command vmware-license-enter.sh which did not work at all, but looking at the contents of the script, allowed me to figure out the correct command to run.

So, there you have it! Hopefully this will be of some use to others, but more of a bookmark for me!

Enjoy!