Virtual Device Serial0 Will Start Disconnected High Quality Guide

This article applies to VMware Workstation Pro/Player 15–17, VMware Fusion 11–13, and ESXi 6.5 through 8.0. For older versions, the behavior and fix remain fundamentally the same.

If you have ever powered on a virtual machine in VMware Workstation, VMware Player, or VMware ESXi and glanced at the log files or the console output, you may have encountered the following message:

The VM is configured to map serial0 to a physical COM port on the host machine, but the host lacks a physical serial port or the port is disabled in the host BIOS. virtual device serial0 will start disconnected

If you are managing VMs remotely, using ESXi, or prefer editing configuration files directly, you can fix the issue by modifying the VM’s .vmx file.

For advanced users or headless ESXi environments, you can fix this issue directly within the virtual machine configuration file. If you are managing VMs remotely, using ESXi,

In VM Settings, ensure the "Connection" is set to the correct physical port (e.g., /dev/ttyUSB0 In 90% of cases, this error is just

Navigate to the directory on your host computer or datastore where the VM files are stored. Locate the file ending in .vmx (e.g., Ubuntu_64-bit.vmx ). Locate the file ending in

Most modern occurrences are caused by a recent VMware update (Workstation 17.5+ or Fusion 13.5+). VMware discontinued support for

Global virtual printing can only be enabled if your Fusion version includes ThinPrint (pre‑13.5). For newer versions, this solution is not applicable and the recommended approach is to remove the thinprint ‑related entries from the .vmx file.

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