Hey there,
System Information:
OS: Debian 12, Gnome 43.6
Product: VMware® Workstation 17 Player (individual, non-commercial use)
Version: 17.0.2 build-21581411
Problem:
I installed Workstation player and created a new VM (Debian 12 guest) - actually two - on my Debian 12 host machine. The VM creation worked as expected, so did the installation and initial boot of the VM. However, when I launch Workstation player again after powering off the VM and closing Workstation player, the list of VMs is empty. When I try to open this VM - or any other test VM for that matter - nothing happens. No error messages are shown, but nothing further is happening. I'm thrown to the main Workstation player window with no changes.
I tried to open the VM in two ways:
1. Launching Workstation player, klicking "Open a Virtual Machine" on the right side, selecting the path to my vm.vmx and clicking on "Open".
2. Launching Workstation player, klicking "File" at the top menu bar, klicking "Open a Virtual Machine", selecting the path to my vm.vmx and clicking on "Open".
Troubleshooting steps I already tried:
1. Rebooting my machine.
2. Relaunching Workstation player as root user.
3. Creating a new test VM.
4. Search online for answers. Found one thread with the identical issue, but unfortunately no solution was provided.
5. "tail -f /home/user/vmware/vm_dir/vmware.log" while trying to open VM. No new output.
EDIT: Workaround found (not a solution)
I found that the VM will open and boot sucessfully if I navigate to my vm.vmx file in my file manager, right-click on the file and click on "Open with VMware Player". The list of VMs is still empty though and trying to open the VM through Workstation Player still results in nothing. But at least I'm able to run my VM when I need too. Maybe this will help someone in the future.
Does anybody here every experience this and was able to fix it? Or does anybody have any ideas, that I could try to solve the issue? I'm not sure what else I could try. Any advice would be much appreciated!
Best regards,
