I use a lot of VMs too and found this post promising (came through watching the episode for deskspace, realising it was not free, going for the "free alternative", checking this post and trying it out) but I have spent way longer than I expected to make it work the way I wanted (probably due to Murphy's laws!):
- I have a Vista host and VMWare 6 as moonlit
- I wanted to use 3 VMs simultaneously with the cube thing
The problem was that, if you only have 1 VMWare open in three desktops and on each of them you display one VM the cube works until you type on one VM, once you type the other desktops show the same VM you just typed on.
If you are confused, you can do this by Having VMWare open in one desktop and open the other VMs directly using the vmx file. 3 VMs --> 1 VMWare instance.
The way I made it work was to open 1 VMWare instance on each desktop, this is more resource intensive (my laptop almost crashes) so I had to remove a bit of RAM in a couple of VMs.
The latter approach involves clicking on the VMWare icon from 3 desktops, you might have problems saying that the VM is in use, blah blah. Just right click on it from the VMWare instance in which you opened it and select "Close", now you can run it from somewhere else.
The final slight annoyance I am having is that CTRL+SHIFT is not picked up by XP guests that have VMWare tools installed so you have to CTRL+ALT first, then CTRL+SHIFT. I have mitigated this a bit by changing YODM to change desktops with CTRL+[WINDOWS KEY], so CTRL+ALT and then CTRL+[WINDOWS KEY] is a bit more comfortable (although still not ideal).
I hope my research spares somebody confusion and frustration! :)