On Workstation 15.5 PRO running on host linux centos 8: export to OVF fails on error immediately

[kandooer]

Hi,

after a very disappointing experience with VMWare Technical Support who, after some attemps, replied me "Export your ovf from Workstation on Windows instead of Linux", I decided to present my issue in the community.

I bet I am not the first person doing this, that is:

Environment:

     host: Centos 8 running on a cloud platform, running itself on KVM. Nested virtualization works
               I run Workstation 15.5 on this platform: it works great, I have create several vm's with success and can run them on other platforms

The problem comes when I want to export one VM to the .ovf format.

Steps:

     1) File

     2) Export to OVF

     3) choose location

     4) Save

Just after clicking on save, I get the message "Export failed: Unknown error, please try again. If the problem persists, please contact VMware Technical Support and provide /tmp/vmware-informix/ovftool.log"

Yes, the problem persists (I reproduce it everytime) and the log file /tmp/vmware-informix/ovftool.log does not exist

Looking at the log file, I can see

2020-04-11T11:10:01.043+02:00| vmui| I125: SOCKET creating new socket, connecting to /var/run/vmware/usbarbitrator-socket

2020-04-11T11:10:01.043+02:00| vmui| I125: SOCKET connect failed, error 111: Connection refused

continuously

I bet this is my problem, but I do not know how to troubleshoot this and fix it.

Any help greaztly appreciated

Thanks and stay safe!

Eric

[dariusd]

Is the USB arbitrator running?  Try sudo /etc/init.d/vmware-USBArbitrator start if it is not already running.

You can also try launching ovftool to perform the OVF export from the command-line (while Workstation is not running) and see if that succeeds... or perhaps produces more informative messages.

--

Darius

[kandooer]

I attach the log file