After installing newest VMware Workstation 14, it turned out that the automation API stopped working with the following error
Retrieving the COM class factory for component with CLSID{COMPONENT-ID} failed due to the following error: 80040154 Class not registered(Exception from HRESULT: 0x80040154(REGDB_E_CLASSNOTREG)).
It seems that the newest version does not install two important COM DLL files (and consequently does not register them): VIXCOM.dll
and VIXCOM64.dll
. The solution is to copy them over from older installation and register them (as administrator):
regsvr32.exe VIXCOM.dll regsvr32.exe VIXCOM64.dll
Things start working after this little trick. Alternatively, a full VIX API 1.15 has to be installed (it is available as a separate download from VMware support pages).
The problem has been tackled by our support and is described here
https://raynetgmbh.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000277786-RSC200351-Executing-Virtual-Machine-Operations-on-VMware-Workstation-14
Note: Since both DLLs can be freely distributed, you can download them from the above link in case you don’t have older installation of VMware Workstation.
It works also for VMware Workstation 16.