Remove “safely remove hardware” icon from a VMware Windows OS guest

If you host Windows Terminal Servers or Citrix Servers on your VMware Infrastructure, you may have the problem that users find and use the “Eject Ethernet Controller” button in the windows tool bar (of course they need the necessary rights):

The funny thing is, that the user can disable/remove the NIC from the server he is on… and disconnect all other users of course, too.

Workaround:
Remove the icon “safely remove hardware” from the toolbar

• power off the virtual machine
• open “edit settings”
• select the “Options” Tab
• select “General” – “Configuration Parameters”
• click “Add Row”
• add a field named: “devices.hotplug” with value: “FALSE” (no quotes…)
• power on VM -> no more icon…

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