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2 Replies Last post: Jan 26, 2008 6:39 PM by plasmoidia
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Cannot start virtual machines with server 1.0.4

Jan 26, 2008 12:41 PM

Click to view plasmoidia's profile Novice plasmoidia 6 posts since
Jan 26, 2008

I just installed Server 1.0.4 on Fedora 8 x86_64. I am running on a box with an Athlon 64 x2, socket 939 processor (so, sadly, no virtualization instructions). I have the latest Fedora 8 updates, running kernel 2.6.23.14-107.fc8. Install and setup went smoothly and the Server Console connects just fine. However, when I go to start a virtual machine, I immediately get an error:

Unable to change virtual machine power state: The process exited with an error:
End of error message.

And nothing else happens. I have tried server different VMs (64-bit and 32-bit), including an appliance I have run on other machines, but no change.

Does anyone have any idea what might be going on? Is there anything I can do to get some useful output to debug the problem?

Thanks.

Tags: vmware_server, fedora_8, 64bit, linux_host, linux_guest, linux
Reply Re: Cannot start virtual machines with server 1.0.4 Jan 26, 2008 12:49 PM
Click to view plasmoidia's profile Novice plasmoidia 6 posts since
Jan 26, 2008

Aha, I just found the "Run with debugging information" under Options, Advanced. Now I get an error out of it:

Unable to change virtual machine power state: The process exited with an error:

vmxvmdb: Index name being generated from config file
POST(no connection): Version mismatch with vmmon module: expecting 138.0, got 137.0.
You have an incorrect version of the `vmmon' kernel module.
Try reinstalling VMware Server.

POST(no connection): Failed to initialize monitor device.

Failed to initialize VM.
End of error message.

The vmmon kernel module shows up in lsmod. I had to install the vmware-any-any-update115 to get it to compile. Any ideas on how to fix this?


Reply Re: Cannot start virtual machines with server 1.0.4 Jan 26, 2008 6:39 PM
in response to: plasmoidia
Click to view plasmoidia's profile Novice plasmoidia 6 posts since
Jan 26, 2008

Okay, I was able to fix the problem. The short version is I had to run vmware-config.pl twice to get it to build the correct version of the vmmon kernel module.

Long explanation:

The vmware-any-any-update115 uses a script getversion.pl to determine for what version of VMware the vmmon module should be built. It calls:

vmware -v < /dev/null 2>&1

to determine the version. Unfortunately, if you have not run vmware-config.pl before (which is impossible since the vmmon won't compile...), the command errors out saying that vmware-config.pl has not been run. In the process, it does not actually give the version.

So, the first time vmware-config.pl is run, it builds the module for the wrong version. The second time, the above command works, since everything is configured now, and builds the module with the correct version.

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