Hello there! I appear to have run into an interesting quirk in some automated testing I'm setting up using the VIX VM Perl API, and was wondering if anyone had seen anything similar and/or could offer any advice.
So I'm trying to see how various network problems - throttled bandwidth, dropped packets, etc. - adversely affect a client I'm building. I have a VM created, running in VMWare Workstation 8, where I have a copy of the client installed. When I try to throttle my bandwidth using the Workstation UI - [right click on VM] > Settings > Network Adapter > Advanced > [change numbers] > OK > OK - everything works beautifully. The log files show reduced bandwidth, I can visually see video streaming quality degrade, and everything else is precisely as one would expect.
But I'd love to automate this task to get better test coverage, so I've tried to emulate the same experience with the VIX API in Perl. The VMWriteVariable calls return successfully when I try to modify the "ethernet0.rxbw.limit" and "ethernet0.txbw.limit" values in the runtime. The VMReadVariable calls confirm that the changes to those variables have been made. But the network performance is not actually affected; everything continues operating as if the network bandwith options had not been touched. (Although interestingly, if I *then* go into the VM via the VMWare Workstation UI and inspect those values? Clicking "OK" and "OK" in the above sequence will make the runtime "notice" my changes, which suddenly go into effect.)
Does anyone have any insight on what might be causing this or how I might get around it? I've pored over the documentation and didn't see anything obvious, like a "send this message to force runtime changes to be uptaken" or anything. Wasn't sure if this was a bug, or operator error on my end, or something else entirely. If anyone can float some advice my way, I'd be ever so thankful!