For a while now I’ve been trying to set up VMware to work with multiple monitors, in a Linux guest. With some windowmanagers it works out of the box without any issue, such as with Unity. I never figured out how to do it with xmonad, and recently I switched to i3 just to try something new. The damn “Cycle multiple monitors” button didn’t work here either. When I tried it, a message popped up saying:
The virtual machine must have up-to-date VMware Tools installed and running.
..which it had!
However, I found a solution! Place the following line in your i3 configuration file, whether it be ~/.i3/config or ~/.config/i3/config:
exec --no-startup-id vmware-user
..and that’s it! Reload your i3 configuration, and now you should be able to press the “Cycle multiple monitors” button and have dual monitors in your VMware guest!