By default, you can share a smart card between virtual machines or between the host system and one or more virtual machines. You might want to disable smart card sharing if you are using a PCMCIA smart card reader, deploying virtual machines for enterprise use and do not want to support drivers for various smart card readers, or the host system has drivers but the virtual machines do not.

The setting that controls smart card sharing is located in the Workstation Pro global configuration file.

Procedure

  1. Find the global configuration file on the host system.
    Operating System Location
    Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2016, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10 hosts %PROGRAMDATA%\VMware\VMware Workstation\config.ini
    Linux hosts /etc/vmware/config
  2. If the global configuration file does not yet exist on the host system, select Edit > Preferences and change at least one Workstation Pro preference setting.
    Workstation Pro creates the global configuration file when you change Workstation Pro preference settings.
  3. Open the global configuration file in a text editor and set the usb.ccid.useSharedMode property to FALSE.
    For example: usb.ccid.useSharedMode = "FALSE"
  4. Save and close the global configuration file.
  5. Set permissions on the global configuration file so that other users cannot change it.