Can't Enable Sharing / "Failed to configure the Workstation Server"

[ndavie]

Everything was fine until I made the mistake of upgrading to 12.1.1 build-3770994 from 12.0(?)

For some reason sharing became disabled after the upgrade.

I can't enable sharing, I get "Failed to configure the Workstation Server"

Seems everytime I upgrade VMWare Workstation something breaks :smileycry:

I had to moce the shared VMs to "normal" VMs so I could run them.

I've repaired, uninstalled and reinstalled and still have the same failure. :smileyangry:

[ndavie]

No one can answer this question?

[a_p_]

When you try to manually start the service, what does it say?

Also check the Windows Event Viewer logs after the that to see whether it reports any issues with the service, or any dependencies.

André

[ndavie]

Starting VMware Workstation Server manually results in:

Windows could not start the VMware Workstation Server on Local Computer.  [blah blah]

service-specifc error code -1.

The event log simply states:

The VMware Workstation Server service entered the running state.

The VMware Workstation Server service entered the stopped state.

The VMware Workstation Server service terminated with service-specific error %%-1.

[wjwj]

Could you please upload the installer log and hostd log files? Thanks.

[ndavie]

Attached logs

[wjwj]

Many thanks.

From logs, it looks that you also installed VMware vCenter Converter Standalone?

Btw, what's your host os? I'd like to reproduce the issue.

[wjwj]

Hi, can you please upload vm-support data? Thank you very much.

[ndavie]

Can you be more specific.  What files are you asking for?

[wjwj]

You can collect support data by clicking menu: Help -> Support -> Collect support data, and then upload the files collected. Thanks.

[ndavie]

Attached support data.

[wjwj · Accepted solution]

I took a look at the uploaded files, and saw datastores.xml is empty, which looks weird.

From hostd.log, it crashed during parsing datastores.xml file:

2016-05-26T10:11:07.572-07:00 verbose hostd[08848] [Originator@6876 sub=Hostsvc] StorageNativeProvider: Inventory filepath is C:\ProgramData\VMware\hostd\datastores.xml

2016-05-26T10:11:07.573-07:00 panic hostd[08848] [Originator@6876 sub=Default] error: class Vmacore::Xml::XMLParseException(not well-formed (invalid token))

2016-05-26T10:11:07.580-07:00 panic hostd[08848] [Originator@6876 sub=Default] backtrace:

Maybe, you can try removing the configuration files during uninstall Workstation, after then, install Workstation again.

[ndavie]

Complete and utter removal of all vmware files, and then re-installation solved the problem.

I didn't realize how much data was not removed when uninstalling.

Thank you so much for your suggestion.  I didn't think a .1 upgrade would require so much intervention.

[austinb324]

This fix did not work for me. I removed every file I could find after I uninstalled. Rebooted. Still, once I reinstalled the issue persisted. I followed this KB: Cleaning up after an incomplete uninstallation on a Windows host (1308) | VMware KB

My last resort will be a re-image of my machine I suppose.