Run in background - inaccessable - reboot host needed

[jsa]

Workstation 6.5.0 118166 Windows Vista Ultimate Host.

I've grown fond of Run in background and have used it since extensivly. (I know how it used to work).

The Tray Icon is there, but only shows 1 virtual machine running, (two are) but the tray icon does not show the pop-up list of names and therefore there is no way to get the vmware window to re-appear so I canaccess theVMs.

I can launch another copy but I still can't access the running VM. Reboot seemsthe only way out.

How do you access a vm running in background to bring it to the foreground?

[jsa]

> You could also probably remote desktop to the VM (if enabled) and shutdown from within the VM itself.

Or, VMware could fix this. The problem has been outstanding for way too long. I already burned a support incident on this and the "resolution" was that running in the background was not supported on vista 64 hosts. This is contrary to their continued advertising.

Its beyond annoying, and becoming a serious inconvienece to me.

[JoeJaguar]

Not sure if this might help...

I just installed VMware Workstation 6.5.1 build 126130 on my new PC, a Windows Vista Home Premium 64 bit and was having somewhat simliar problems with the vmware-tray app. The item was always displaying "No Virtual Machines Running" even if I had some old vms that I was running after using the "open existing VM" option. These VMs were Workstation 6.0 virtual machines. Yet When I built a new 6.5 virtual machine it shows now as a running VM in the tray. Also, when I do an import of a 6.0 VM and it clones it into a 6.5, the VM will now show as a running VM in the tray too.

So does anyone notice the same pattern with the VMs they are having problems with under 6.5.1? Doesn't seem like the 6.5.1 tray app can manage non 6.5 VMs, at least in my setup.

[jsa]

I'm not seeing this.

I had a brand new VM, (Windows 7). I fired it up, and the tray icon still said no VMs running.

Further, when I made the setting to keep vms running after VMware was shut down, and then shut down VMware, that Virtual machine continued to run, but was not reachable. The tray icon still insisted that there were no VMs running, and none of the command line options mentioned up-thread were able to access the virtual machine. Same thing with my newly created UbuntuVM.

Can you verify that you can indeed select the pereference option to allow VMs to continue to run when VMWare is shut down and then access them via the Tray Icon?

With enough dicking around I can occasionally get the tray icon to say one vm is running, (usually when two or three are) but backgrounding any of them makes them inaccessable and I have to use task manager to kill them.

I'm really thinking that since Vmware continues to advertise this capability which has never worked in the current version on 64bit that it is put up or shut up time, and they should fix the advertising or fix the program.

[darrellchapman]

I have the very same problem running VMWare Worksation 6.5 in Windows XP Pro x64 with 16GB RAM and unfortunately won't be much help. However, I did want to comment to TShepherd.

From what I've been told, Windows XP Pro x64 uses the same kernel as Windows Server 2003 x64 so that's why so many programs see it as Windows Server 2003. And becuase the latest service pack for W2k3 is SP2, SP2 is the latest service that you should have installed on your XP x64 machine (there is no SP3 for XP x64). I be surprised if you were able to install the XP x86 SP3 on your machine. And if you were, I'd suspect there would be lots of stability problems.Can you verify that you do indeed have SP3 on x64?

[TShepherd]

You're correct. I only have SP2. I installed SP3 on another machine a while back, didn't notice that there was no x64 equivalent and simply assumed that my 64bit machine was the same.

[darrellchapman]

Glad I'm not missing out on a service pack.

[draggonfly]

Vista ultimate X64 SP2, same fricken issue across all x64 systems. it bugs and glitches randomly and randomly decides if it wants to open background machines or not, most times not, i just managed to reopen two background machines by repeatedly trying to open them using the tray icon, but once i closed those two, i cant do anything with the try icon anymore and i still have two other virtual machines running. wonderful.

FIX FOR THIS!

[jsa]

Almost a year since I reported this problem Run in Background FINALLY WORKS with VMware 6.5.3.

I torn between carping about how long it took and being thankful it actually works again.

[draggonfly]

are you kidding? they fixed it?

i just installed it last night, but didnt have time to test it out. so glad somebody else tested it out for me beforehand! Cool!

OH WOW!~ (Just tried it)

IT WORKSSSS!!!!! 😮

[jacobmross]

Sadly - at least on my Win7 x64 (Enterprise RTM) box it appears the issue still exists with 6.5.3.

I ran into it on 6.5.2, and when 6.5.3 came out (fixing the NAT issues) I upgraded, and the whole background VM / general tray status issue was still present.

I recently picked up a new SSD, and opted to reinstall everything, rather than image my previous install, which also meant reinstalling VMware workstation

So, on my current install, Workstation was installed as 6.5.3 originally, and I'm still seeing the issue.

Just an FYI

[tdk]

Looks like I have to reactivate this thread again for VMware Workstation 7.0.1!

I have a Red Hat ES5 running in background and when I try to bring it back to the fore via the tray icon VMWare fails complaining

"Failed to get exclusive lock on the configuration file. Another vmware process could be running using this configuration file"

When I hit the OK button of this message I get another (helpful!) message from VMwks:

"Internal error."

My tray icon works ok, showing 1 process and "vmrun list" also shows the running guest.

To solve this dilemma I login into the guest and shut it down, then I can restart it via VMwks.

Is there a solution for this problem available or is "backgrounding" still not supported on Vista x64?

Host System: VMWare Workstation 7.0.1 on Dell E521: Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 5600+ 2.8 GHz, 4 GB RAM, Vista Business x64

[happyuserbg]

I have similar issue using VMware Workstation 7.1 on Windows 7 Enterprise x64 host.

I have selected the option to keep VMs running after Workstation closes. When I start a VM, close Workstation and start it again, the Powered On list is empty. If I click on the VM in Favorites, nothing happens, but then I can’t close Workstation, nothing happens when I click on the X button. I have to kill it.

I looked in the vmware.log of one VM, which is running in background and I see these 2 lines every time I start Workstation:

Aug 03 13:36:24.875: vmx| CnxHandleConnection: WSASocket returned error 10022.

Aug 03 13:36:24.875: vmx| VMAutomation: Cnx_CompleteAsyncOperation() failed.

I have set vmauthd.logEnabled to TRUE but I don’t see any errors when I start Workstation. But every 5 seconds a new line is added like these:

Aug 03 13:40:53.124: app-1860| HardLimitMonitor. Too many page faults (13460). Scale limit down to 893339

Aug 03 13:40:58.127: app-1860| HardLimitMonitor. Too many page faults (13436). Scale limit down to 893320

Aug 03 13:41:03.130: app-1860| HardLimitMonitor. Too many page faults (120). Scale limit down to 893225

I am running F-Secure Client Security and unfortunately I can’t uninstall it because it is enforced by our system administrators. I have stopped its services and I still have the same problem.

I have same VMware version running on Windows 7 Ultimate x64 host with NOD32 Antivirus and I don’t have this problem there.

Host parameters:

CPU: Core i5-650

RAM: 4 GB DDR3-1333

Paging file: 2 GB

OS: Windows 7 Enterprise x64

[pa_ma]

Hello i found a easy way to get access to a VM running in background without restarting the host.

I suspend the VM via command line: vmrun suspend path to vmx file

After this the VM is accessable again in the VMware Workstation Interface and you can resume the VM.

OK the VM is for a short time not running but still better than a complete reboot of the Host

[benjiairtime]

Hiya,

New to the forums but have been using Workstation since 5.5 and ESX since 2.1

I'm getting this with Workstation 8.0.1!

I also can't connect to a 'shared' VM but it boots fine and can be RDP'd onto... see http://communities.vmware.com/message/1866783#1866783 (with no responses!)

I also can't re-connect to any backgrounded machines.  My tray icon seems to list them accurately but if it points the Workstation window to the guest, it cannot access the console and the Workstation window then hangs.  I've gotten into the workaround of RDP & shutdown.

Sometimes when switching between some of my VM's workstation hangs and may or may not connect to a guest and then the vmware.exe process hangs.

I'm over this!

[continuum]

to reconnect to a VM running in the background make sure
- that you dont have the VM open in a tab inside a second vmware.exe instance
- that you run vmware.exe as administrator
- that the vmware authd service is running
- and eventually have UAC turned off if you use win7 or 2008 R2

[benjiairtime]

Thanks for the prompt reply - I didn't even think of UAC as a thing to eliminate.  Is UAC dealbreaker for backgrounded VM's?  I wonder if it was also related to the issues I've had with VMs after sharing them...

Will disable it and try again.  I'll launch vmware.exe as an admin too - nice tips (thanks for pointing out the 101-level steps!)

[continuum]

UAC is discussed controversially here.
Some folks say that Workstation is fully functional  for them with UAC enabled.

Others cant install Workstation at all with UAC enabled.

Personally I disable UAC directly after installing Windows 7 or 2008 as I find  totally anoying.

[Bernd_Nowak]

Windows 7 with UAC full and Vmware Workstation 8.0.1 and no problems connecting to VMs running in the back. I had a similiar problem with my PC and symptoms had been: not able to connect to VMs running in background and Unity wasn't working. No need for run as admin.

Switching UAC on/off might be no problem unless you install programs with mixing UAC levels. Reason is that with UAC on Windows 7 (maybe Vista too) is working with registry virtualisation. But whatever works is fine so I'm not strict against UAC.

After painful search it was a Nvidia firewall program which wasn't used by me but installed by me during some Nvidia update. Uninstalled this Nvidia thing and since then it was working nicely.