Work Station 14 Pro can not stop VM machine running in the back ground

[rusty201110141]

I have 3 VM machine on a local laptop 2 windows 7 and one windows 10

The two windows 7 machines start on boot up of the laptop and run in the background and I can not power them up or power them down. I try to kill them with Task Manager but they start up again.

I am not able to do any thing with these two VMs in the user interface.

The Windows 10 VM starts and stops with no problem.

[NathanosBlightc]

Hello rusty

In the Preferences tab of VMware workstation you can configure How VMs react, running in background or not. So if you do not need them to run in background, disable it.

But about stopping process with task manager maybe you just stop process of VMware Workstation, not exactly running VMs related process, check them with:

cmd > tasklist  then find the intended PIDs and stop them with taskkill in run-as admin cmd environment

appropriate

[rusty201110141]

Thankyou for that but they are still running,

VMware Workstation cannot connect to the virtual machine. Make sure you have rights to run the program, access all directories the program uses, and access all directories for temporary files.

Failed to connect pipe to virtual machine: All pipe instances are busy

I am run the VM desktop as admin

[NathanosBlightc]

Did you check if you run your VMware Workstation from a runas-admin CMD, still you cannot have access to your VMs? I have this issue many times ago and with this way when system let me access to manage VM, then i could control VMs again, even with running in startup state.

Also check it if you switch account to exact local administrator of your system and run VMware Workstation, problem remains or not ...

[rusty201110141]

Thank you again but I just do not seem to get any where

[NathanosBlightc]

Don't give up buddy, try this command:

vmrun -T ws stop "path_of_VMX_file" hard

I think this can be helpful in your situation

[AveryFreeman]

I had a similar issue with an instance of ESXi 7.0.2 running in the background in Workstation 16 to serve VCSA on a desktop computer running Windows 21H1.  The VM start was a script using vmrun to run it in the background on boot (highest privileges) imported as a task in Task Scheduler.

My user account I created the task with had domain connection issues, I had to leave the domain and re-join.  Then Workstation said it had lost the trust relationship with the domain.  The VM previously had shown running in the tray, now I could not stop it using vmrun -T ws stop, manually stopping vhost, etc. and I could not open the VM in workstation GUI (said it was running, but was not, could not take ownership, etc.)

Ultimately, I went to control panel -> Programs -> Vmware Workstation, hit "change" above and then "repair" and it re-installed my instance of Workstation. After a reboot, the task in Task Scheduler worked properly again (can open VM in GUI, play icon in tray, etc.)

Hope this helps someone else.