VMware Workstation Player on Ubuntu 22 not starting Servers

[kuchenmann]

I've installed VMware-Workstation-Player 17 on Ubuntu 22.
But it does not start the virtual machines.
It just shows "The virtual machine is powered off or suspended" for a few seconds, than it closes.

I've installed CentOS6.8 and Rocky9 for testing.
I've done this already on my Windows 10 notebook (with exactly the same ISOs) where it works without problems.
But I wanted to move it from my notebook to the Ubuntu-server.
Any suggestions?
Thanks.
Chris

[SebastianOhl]

Hi,

i have the same problem. It seams that there is a problem with the vulcan driver. If 3d acceneration is disabled, it works (but with slow graphics). The attached log shows the error starting from line 646.

Other applications can use 3D acceleration as expected. Only vmware player is crashing.

kernel: ​6.2.0-26-generic #26~22.04.1-Ubuntu
VMware workstation player 17.0.2 build-21581411
Nvidia driver: 535.86.05-0ubuntu0.22.04.1

Regards

 Sebastian Ohl

[bluefirestorm]

Sebastian,

I don't know why it is crashing and not so sure if you have the same problem as the original post. But from the mksSandbox.log, it looks like the slower Intel UHD 630 is being used instead of the faster discrete GPU Nvidia Quadro P2000.

2023-08-16T09:18:44.719Z In(05) mks Vulkan Renderer: Vulkan Device 0:
2023-08-16T09:18:44.719Z In(05) mks Vulkan Renderer: Vendor: 'Intel'
2023-08-16T09:18:44.719Z In(05) mks Vulkan Renderer: ID: 0x3e9b
2023-08-16T09:18:44.719Z In(05) mks Vulkan Renderer: Type: 0x1
2023-08-16T09:18:44.719Z In(05) mks Vulkan Renderer: Name: 'Intel(R) UHD Graphics 630 (CFL GT2)'

2023-08-16T09:18:44.719Z In(05) mks Vulkan Renderer: Vulkan Device 1:
2023-08-16T09:18:44.719Z In(05) mks Vulkan Renderer: Vendor= 'NVIDIA'
2023-08-16T09:18:44.719Z In(05) mks Vulkan Renderer: ID= 0x1cba
2023-08-16T09:18:44.719Z In(05) mks Vulkan Renderer: Type= 0x2
2023-08-16T09:18:44.719Z In(05) mks Vulkan Renderer: Name= 'Quadro P2000'

2023-08-16T09:18:44.720Z In(05) mks Vulkan Renderer: Using device 0 of 3

You could try switching to using discrete.
Add the following line to the vmx of VM

mks.forceDiscreteGPU = "TRUE"

Or you could add it to

/etc/vmware/config

so that it applies machine-wide instead of adding it to every VM vmx.

[SebastianOhl]

thanks for the hint. unfortunally, it did not helped but guided me to the right track.

the problem is indeed that vmware player is selecting the wrong graphics card out of the two installed in my laptop. The current X configuration uses nvidia prime to select the right gpu. setting the mentioned parameter did not help (not in vmx nor in system wide config). However, starting vmplayer with some environment variables to select the right GPU did.

Simple solution is to use the prime-run script (https://gist.github.com/abenson/a5264836c4e6bf22c8c8415bb616204a) to start vmplayer. 

[bluefirestorm]

I forgot that Nvidia Pascal (and earlier) GPUs will also need this line.

mks.vk.allowUnsupportedDevices = "TRUE"

This is because VMware Workstation/Player will use Vulkan by default for Nvidia Turing and newer GPUs. Normally, VMware Workstation/Player will automatically fall back to OpenGL from Vulkan on a Linux host if the GPU is not of the right generation. But as the integrated Intel is Coffee Lake (Skylake and newer Intel GPUs will also have Vulkan as default renderer), I suppose it didn't fall back to OpenGL and let you use the P2000.

Alternatively, if you want to have OpenGL instead of Vulkan as the render API; add these lines

mks.enableVulkanRenderer = "FALSE"
mks.enableGLRenderer = "TRUE"