"Cannot power on virtual machine: Too many virtual machines"

[michaelpbreen]

Hello,

I am receiving this message all of a sudden: "Cannot power on virtual machine: Too many virtual machines." I get this message for any VM, regardless of OS for the VM (Windows and Linux) that I try to start or resume.

I say "all of a sudden", because I have been running Fusion for at least 18 months without any major issues and I primarily only use a single VM on a daily basis (Windows XP). I am sure something on my system changed to cause this, but I don't know what that may be, so I am hoping to get some troubleshooting assistance. Here are some details:

Running on a Mac Pro with 10GB RAM; Mac OS X v10.6.5; VMWare Fusion 3.1.1.

I have attached a screenshot of the error message.

I did see one post in 2007 that had this message, but there was no solution provided.

Thanks for your help and please let me know if I can provide any additional information.

Thanks,

Mike

[michaelpbreen]

Hello,

Re-installing Fusion made no difference - still receive the same error message.

Thanks,

Mike

[michaelpbreen]

Hello,

Fixed by running Fusion Uninstall and then doing a manual uninstall (deleting Fusion files and directories). I then restarted the Mac and did a clean Fusion install. It's possible the restart would have fixed the problem, but it was just as easy to do a reinstall of Fusion.

Thanks,

Mike

[vov]

I think it may have to do with how macOS was started. I know that booting up your Mac using the “Startup Manager” (the EFI boot menu, which load up when you power-on the computer while pressing “OPTION”) disables virtualization on the OS (I’ve experienced this with boot camp + windows partitions before). I landed on this thread precisely because I was seeing this too, when I had to use the Startup Manager to bring back macOS after a failed boot to an external Windows drive, then I started to notice this message on Fusion.

I fixed it by using “Startup Disk” on “System preferences” to change the startup disk from Windows to macOS, and reboot again - this time, directly to macOS. Everything worked after the reboot.

Perhaps you too fiddled/messed up with boot camp / dual booting before?