Why does VMWare Workstation 9, not remember my VMs, favorites, or folders that I create to organize my VMs after exiting and reopening?

[cobbal]

Why does VMWare Workstation 9 not remember my VMs, favorites, or folders that I create to organize my VMs after exiting and reopening?

No matter how many times I open my VMs, mark as favorites, create folders and move VMs into them, everytime I close VMWare Workstation and then re-open they are gone, VMs and all. I have to keep opening the VMs to use them. Very anoying.

I'm on 9.0.1 build-894247 running on Windows 7 Ultimate with all the lates updates and patches. I have full admin rights and even tried telling it to run as adminstrator.

Please note that this had nothing to do with "Shared VMs", which is all I can find when searching, especially if I mention folders.

[continuum]

Open any vmware.log file from a VM you have.
Search for preferences.ini
You should then find the path to the file that is used on your host.

Check if the file exists and if you can write to it

[cobbal]

Thanks for the reply. The path to the preferences.ini was "C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\VMware". I was able to edit and save the file, as well as create a file in the folder.

[cobbal]

Too add to the odd behavior, sometimes it will remember some of my VMs, like now. It had forgotten all of my VMs again (which is why I posted the question), I opened an existing one, and just to be sure nothing is wrong with my existing VMs, created a new one. I closed workstation and re-opened, expecting them to be forgotten, but they were there (opened and closed 2 or 3 time to be sure), then I created a folder, and moved the new VM into that folder, closed and opened again, folder is gone, but both VMs were remembered.

I am sure at some point (maybe if I log off or reboot) it will forget the VMs again too. Only thing consistent is, it has never remembered the folders in my Library. (I probably repeated this cycled over the past few months 20 times, trying to organize my VMs, and at a minimum not having to re-open all of my (darn) VMs when I need to open workstation.)

Also curious if it is normal for it to take at least 18-20 seconds to load the VMs after Workstation first opens (when it does remember them).  ?

[continuum]

If you edit the file - do the changes survive a restart of WS ?

Side by side to that file you should find inventory.vmls

You could back up the file before you close WS and restore it later.

Does this file get wiped blank when you close WS ?

[cobbal]

Edits to preferences.ini appear to survive opening and closing of Workstation.

I see inventory.vmls, made a copy and checked out with wordpad. I see references to my VMs currently in Workstation, as well as other that are not.

Should there be more files in the "C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\VMware"? At a minimum, I appear to be missing the "config.ini." Perhaps this is the problem.

While looking at the vmware.log file I see these:

[msg.dictionary.load.openFailed] Cannot open file "C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\VMware\config.ini": The system cannot find the file specified.

I only have the "inventory.vmls" and "preferences.ini" file in the above folder.

[continuum]

the config.ini is not a problem - config.ini is usually used from the allusersprofile

inventory.vmls is the file that is used to populate the library

is thius file wiped when you exitz Workstation ?

[cobbal]

Files survive closing and opening of Workstation. In fact the folder information appears to survive as well, but not displayed in the Library window.

vmlist4.config = "folder4"
vmlist14.IsClone = "FALSE"
vmlist14.CfgVersion = "8"
vmlist14.State = "normal"
vmlist4.DisplayName = "fudge"
vmlist4.ParentID = "0"
vmlist4.ItemID = "4"
vmlist4.SeqID = "0"
vmlist4.IsFavorite = "FALSE"
vmlist4.IsClone = "FALSE"
vmlist4.CfgVersion = "8"
vmlist4.State = "normal"
vmlist4.UUID = "folder:52 da 98 dd 5d 25 ec 84-e0 be b8 c4 38 41 6a 8f"

At the moment it is remembering the VMs, but not showing the folders.

[joelkilthau]

I'm having symtoms of the original problem here, too, but I'm running Workstation 9.01 on Ubuntu 12.10. Any idea where the preferences are stored in Linux ? Is it in /home/~user/.vmware ?

[clhebdon]

I just had a similar case where I could not open the tab for my favorite vms, named "Library". I restored that tab by removing my removing my inventory.vmls and preferenes.ini files. After restarting VMWare Workstation, my "Library" tab was restored. I had to re-open all of my VM images to get them into my favorites list again, but that only took a few minutes.

In comparing the old inventory.vmls and prefernces.ini files to the new ones created, I don't see anything obvious to tell me why the "Library" tab wasn't restarting before though. So I don't have a reason why this works other other than to say that this work around does work.

[Chaitanyakumar_]

Hi,

In vmware workstation edit menu, preferences, there is an options, "Remember opened tabs between sessions". Check if that helps you.

Chaitanya.

[netlib]

This problem still exists in VMWare Workstation 14 (Windows 10 Pro x64) even though I set "Remember open tabs".  Not all tabs are reopened after exiting and restarting.

[Bosi72]

The problem still exist in VMware® Workstation 16 Pro, upgraded to the latest version 16.1.2 build-17966106

For some reason inventory.vmls remembered when the VM's were run first originally from external drive a couple of months ago ?! 

I have corrected all paths in inventory.vmls, even though there are 17 indexes and I need 6 VM's only? Regardless, I corrected them all, unfortunatelly still no luck.

Why VMWare doesn't have a Menu with list of recent VM's like word, excel, and many other apps ? Very frustrating when you have to add 6 VM's manually every time they intermittently disappear.

Today is 9-Sep-2021, next year will be 10th anniversary of this issue, a bit funny and sad at the same time.

[TanquenETG]

I have this issue from time to time and it's lame when you go to start up workstation the next day and all the VM tabs are gone.

I mostly see this if I've moved a tab into it's own window so I can see two VMs at once and at the end of the day if I close the new windows last I lose all my tabs.

Years ago there was a trick to get them back by recovering a file or something but I can't find that post.