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.