It should be noted that the machine I'm working on has had several of the beta's and RC1 installed, but I was good about uninstalling prior to the next build being installed. I'm going to guess that Estefan's fix of recreating the datastore may have fixed a formatting issue with the xml files VMWare uses and that hopefully people that use VMWare Server on a clean machine don't come across this problem. My assumption here is that the xml files were carried over from previous builds and there might have been some sort of incompatibility between them (but heck, you can't expect config files between beta/RC builds to be backwards compatible). Just glad we were able to help eachother out.

Who designed this....

use: vmrun -T server -h https://myserver:port/sdk -u username -p password stop "standard subdir/machine.vmx"

where "standard" is quite literraly yo u default setting for your datastore.... (I've actually had to type 'standard <space> subdir/machine.vmx' before this worked.....)

First, get the list of VMs:
vmrun -h https://localhost:8333/sdk -u USER -p PASSWORD listRegisteredVM

Returns something like:
[VMWare] fedora9/Fedora 9.vmx
[VMWare] MindTouch_Deki_Wiki_Jay_Cooke_8.05.2_VM/MindTouch_Deki_Wiki/Deki_Wiki_Jay_Cooke_8.05.2_VM.vmx
[VMWare] Win2003ServerStd/Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition.vmx
[VMWare] fedora-9-i386/fedora-9-i386.vmx
[VMWare] WinXPPro1/Windows XP Professional.vmx
[VM] XPvmware/CafeXP.vmx

Now start up the VM you'd like:
cd C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Server
vmrun -h https://localhost:8333/sdk -u USER -p PASSWORD start "[VMWare] WinXPPro1/Windows XP Professional.vmx" nogui

The key is to use the exact line shown above for the VM you want to manage.

I also have this, but none of the above helped

my command is

vmrun -T server -u me -p pw -h https://localhost:8333/sdk start /var/lib/vmware/Virtual\ Machines/magento-1.1.5/JumpBox.vmx nogui

resp is

Error: Cannot open VM: /var/lib/vmware/Virtual Machines/magento-1.1.5/JumpBox.vmx, The virtual machine cannot be found

Another update:

I figured out enough of the datastore concept to use

vmrun -T server -u mcrouch -p PW -h https://localhost:8333/sdk start "standard magento-1.1.5/JumpBox.vmx" nogui

which chugs along for about 30 seconds and then says

Error: Unknown error

I was also seeing the exception: -

Error: The virtual machine cannot be found

when using the VMRUN command ( I'm running VMware Server 2.0 on Ubuntu 9.0.4 64-bit ) as follows: -

vmrun -t server -h https://hostname.domainname.com:8333/sdk -u root -p passw0rd register "/vmwares/domino/Virtual\ Machine.vmx"

Having validated the path to the .VMX file ( /vmwares is a mount point for a 1 TB drive formatted as EXT4 ), I was also baffled.

The syntax of the VMRUN command does imply a logical/physical path to the VM: -

"storage1 vm/myVM.vmx"

and I was missing the obvious - the phrase storage1.

I followed the advice given here to start a VM from the Web UI and then issue the command: -

vmrun -t server -h https://hostname.domainname.com:8333/sdk -u root -p passw0rd list

which showed the running VM as: -

VMwares on Samsung domino/Virtual\ Machine.vmx

Once I had this ( slightly strange ) "path", I was good to go.

I can now start my VM as follows: -

+vmrun -t server -h https://hostname.domainname.com:8333/sdk -u root -p passw0rd start "VMwares on Samsung domino/Virtual\ Machine.vmx"+

and, if I want to be mean, stop it as follows: -

+vmrun -t server -h https://hostname.domainname.com:8333/sdk -u root
-p passw0rd stop "VMwares on Samsung domino/Virtual\ Machine.vmx"+

Simple