Old thread but I want to help out others when they're searching for this.
I'm on VMWare 15.5 Workstation Pro, for reference. I do not know if this is the same in 16.x, but I would assume so.
As a check beforehand, if you click F9 (View > Customize > Library), any VMs that are already added in there will not show up on another scan, from what I've seen. I would try launching the VM from there if you see it listed, but if it fails, then you will need to troubleshoot that before getting into this.
If you don't have anything listed in there, or VMs are missing, I would recommend doing the following:
Delete everything out of your library, right click on "My Computer" and also select "Remove Non-existant Virtual Machines", close VMWare completely, and then reopen. I *think* this is happening because at launch it doesn't recognize the VMs, but still has it added to the library for when it does recognize it later on.
As an additional note:
I found a related thread from a few years back, but the solution of "double check permissions" doesn't seem to work. Also, as the user in there pointed out, I cannot open up a support ticket with their tech team because the standard support license only lasts 30 days.
https://communities.vmware.com/t5/VMware-Workstation-Pro/Workstation-pro-16-does-not-scan-for-existi...
I've also done some digging into this because it's very annoying.
Per the documentation: https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Workstation-Pro/16.0/com.vmware.ws.using.doc/GUID-A8614A58-610B-43...
It considers .vmx a valid VM.
