Cannot find a valid peer process to connect to

[rabba]

Hello,

i get this message when i do the following:

I'm starting up a VM. Then I close the VMWare Workstation; which gives me a Tray-Icon saying: 1 Virtual Machine Running.

When clicking on that Tray-Icon, i can select the running VM -> VMWare Workstation opens, but it says, that the VM is powered-off. If i click on "Start this virtual machine" the following message occurs: "Cannot find a valid peer process to connect to".

The VM is running, i can use it with a vncviewer. Why does this message show up? How can the problem be solved?

Running VMWare Workstation 6.0 on WinXP; Guests are Win2003; Vista.

Thanks.

Message was edited by:

rabba

[mronsman]

I am having the exact same problem. Anyone know the answer??

Thanx,

Matt

[RobertCram]

Hi,

I got the same error message. It turned out I could solve it by upgrading my virtual machine to WS 6.0 (Main Menu - VM - upgrade or change version).

HTH,

Robert

[jefferbean]

I have the exact same problem. My machine is a Thinkpad T61, my host OS is Windows XP, my guest OS is Ubuntu 7.04, and I'm using VMware Workstation ACE Edition 6.0.0 build-45731. I really like the idea of being able to run a VM in the background, very convenient. But as rabba said, when I try to resume the VM from the system tray icon, it brings up the VMware Workstation application which says that my VM is "powered off". When I try to power it on, I get the "canot find a valid peer process to connect to" error. Like rabba, I know the VM is still running because I can ssh into it. Please help. Thanks.

[asif_thealchemi]

I am getting the same error message.Host operating system Windows Vista Home Basics.

please reply answer at

thank you.

[R_Altman]

I just encountered this problem myself: after closing VMWare, I could not "reconnect" with a running VM. Eventually, I realized this might be a permissions issue and re-enabled the VMWare Authorization Service (normally needed only if you do not have sufficient local privileges to run VMWare). Voila! The tray icon was able to re-connect with the running VM.

Hope this help.

Robert

[michael3]

I had this problem as well. I restarted all the vmware services, to no avail. I fixed it by exitting JungleDisk. JungleDisk acts as a web server, I think. It also interferes with normal operation of some other programs that use or act as a web server.

[ciaranmac]

I got this same error in two of my three Windows XP Pro images which are in a team. The other VM is running fine. I was able to fix it for one image by cloning the VM and adding the clone to the team instead. However this fix doesn't help with my remaining image because I don't have a powered off snapshot that I can clone from. The VM image that won't start shows with a paused icon, I can't get it to power on as I get the message "Cannot find a valid peer process to connect to". If I try to revert to a snapshot, I get the message "The virtual machine was unable to power on after restoring the snapshot. The virtual machine will be left in a suspended state ready to resume from the snapshot". If I then try to power it on it fails, exactly as before.

I'm running VMware Workstation 6.04 build-93507. The host OS is Windows XP Pro SP3.

[ciaranmac]

Update: The VM that would not power up yesterday is fine today. Possibly a host OS reboot is what fixed it?

[MarcoMeerman]

Hi there,

I encountered the same problem and fixed it by closing all the VM Ware processes in taskmanager. Then i restarted VM Ware and the console.

Succes!

Marco Meerman

[hileta]

I've battled this problem since installing Workstation 6.5. Being the genius that I am I decided to do the upgrade while traveling for work and needing the VM's I had with me for the project I'm working on. No stress, right? I finally gave up the fight and copied the .vmdk file to a USB hard drive and created another VM with the same name and hard drive specs. Once created I over wrote the one created by VM 6.5 and voila! I had a functioning VM that had all my software on it. I still had to go thru and set up my network and serial connections and my shared folders. Well this seemed like alot of work to do for the 15+ VM's I keep with me for different projects. So I dove into the problem a bit. After going thru the .vmx files line by line and comparing them and trying to boot my VM after each triail, I finally figured out what was going on. I was my own undoing. Being a neat freak and hating all of the log files VM creates I had previously researched a way to maintain the log files to a small quantity and size. This was done by adding s few lines to the .vmx file:

log.rotatesize = 10000

log.keepold = 2

After deleting these lines in all of my VM's, they all work perfectly.

Hope this helps and saves somebody else the time and embarassment I've dealt with today.

Tim

[nsharish20]

Hi,

Could you please advise me the steps that I need to prevent this problem? Thanks

[Chas49]

I ran into this problem today, checked the forum, and found this thread. My problem was somewhat different. The VM was not running. I was trying to power on the VM. I was going to try a reboot so I started to shut down programs but retry the power on after each application terminated, just in case. It only took one. I shut down a backup program called <Second Copy> and the VM powered on just fine. If this is in fact an application conflict then it is the second one I've run into. The other is the problem associated with Quicken.

[Sri57]

Hey guys, that is very simple problem to fix.

Just make sure that you dont have any unused LCK folders in the location, when you do a file->open, and browse to a vm (if you dint want to save any current states althoguh)

kill all the VM related processes running on you machine (task manager)

restart the vmx86 service, using cmd something like " net start vmx86 " without the quotes, that should fix it.

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remember, i cant be responsible for your data loss or any other risks -

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Thanks

[IdahoJTD]

I experienced this problem on my box this morning with the host being Linux and the Guest being a windows VM.

From the command line I could see that there was and instance of the windows VM was still running

using "vmrun list". I then stopped the VM using "vmrun stop <path to vmx listed in vmrun>". After

that I was able to start up my vm as normal from the VMWare console.

Don't have VMware running on Windows as the host but I'm fairly certain the command is there,

you might have to dig into the program install location to find it.

John

[PaulRyan]

Have gotten this error on my Windows host from time to time.

Sometimes just trying to start the guest again gets things to work.  Tonight it did not. Even restarting Workstation (6.5) itself did not work.

Prompted by others'  suggestion in this thread to restart running VMware services, I did that and it did the trick.  Nice.

[rdzaman]

I am having the same problem on Windows 7. I have converted my XP machine and trying to run VM Player 4 on Windows 7 64 bit Enterprise and getting error   "Cannot find a valid peer process to connect to".

What to do ?

[continuum]

open a cmd as adinistrator and type

net start vmx86

report what happens

[rdzaman]

I have tried the command you told shows

" The requested service has already been started"

After that tried again to run VM Ware and still the same.

[continuum]

Win 7  Enterprise, my XP machine ...

do you run VirtualPC at the same time as Workstation ?

can you run any VM at all ?