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David Ramirez
Asked: 2011-08-20 10:10:32 +0800 CST

vmrun fails to start the VM (VMware Workstation under Linux)

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I want/need to start my VM instances from the command line, or as part of the host boot sequence. Also, as part of a script manually launched on the host at will.

The obvious command for such case would be vmrun start with the nogui option, but this fails consistently in my 3 hosts running VMware Workstation 7.1.4 under CentOS 5.6 (64 bit):

[root@japeto ~/vmware/juno]$ vmrun start juno.vmx nogui

Error: The virtual machine needs to be powered on

If I open the vmware GUI and use the point+click method everything works fine. In fact, once a VM instance has been started this way, then the vmrun start ... nogui works at it should for other VM instances residing in the same host.

But this doesn't help for a headless operation where I can only access the host via ssh.

Any hints ? Thanks.

vmware-workstation

2 Answers

  1. Have you verified that the modules are loading correctly?

    the vmrun command doesn't always auto-load the modules successfully.

    load them manually (/etc/init.d/vmware start) and try vmrun again.

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  2. I got this solution from another forum - and it seems to solve the issue:

    su - -c "vmrun start /export/vmware/juno/juno.vmx nogui"
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