For the last 3.5 years i have about 3 vm’s continously running on my linux 14.04 laptop server (on ssd storage). I use the vmware player software for this, to be precise currently version 6.0.3 combined with vix v1.13.3 used together with a service script which i will share later. (Never updated..
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Right now i want to install a ‘new’ laptop, with ubuntu 16.04 with the latest vmware player and vix, and move my vm’s to the new station.. So here follows that story, with some interresting issue’s…
To start the migration, i installed ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS, with the latest updates. After that i installed the latest version of vmware-player (14.1.1) and vmware-vix (1.15.7).
VMware player and VMware-VIX versions…
Before is started testing, i created a separate user, so that my vm’s are running in a isolated user-space. After copying my vm’s into that user space, i added some test vm’s to vmware player, and it started to run..
Vmware player started to run as it should, i could start an temporary installed vm, all good. But for my implementation, i need vmware-player to run multiple vm’s in headless mode (using the nogui option). This can be achieved with the VIX toolkit, using the vmrun command, but unfortunately it gave the error below:
vmrun -T player start /home/vmware/VMware/kali/kali.vmx nogui Unable to connect to host. Error: The specified version was not found
hrrrr. thats not good. so i looked in the /usr/lib/vmware-vix/vixwrapper-config.txt. Thats the file where VIX API endpoints are defined. It shows a lot of Workstation 12.X entries, but no 14.X entries. My conclusion: 14.X is not supported… 
. So i uninstalled the 14.X version, and installed the latest 12 version..
sudo vmware-installer -u vmware-player sudo ./VMware-Player-12.5.7-5813279.x86_64.bundle vmware-installer -l Product Name Product Version ==================== ==================== vmware-vix 1.15.7.5115892 vmware-player 12.5.7.5813279
and viola: is started to work, see two vmware-vmx entries in thge top command below. 🙂
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 12527 vmware 20 0 1936860 732648 714560 S 6.6 4.5 3:11.69 vmware-vmx 12635 vmware 20 0 2948984 484812 459484 S 0.7 3.0 0:30.14 vmware-vmx 13288 vmware 20 0 41932 3936 3204 R 0.7 0.0 0:00.04 top
Another error
In an earlier test scenario i bumped into the following error: (With vmware-player version 12.5.7 and vmware-vix 1.15.0)
vmrun -T player start /home/vmware/VMware/kali/kali.vmx nogui Error: Unknown error
The solution is hard to find on the web, but for me it helped to update your VIX setup to the latest version. (Just to let you know..)
Running VM’s as a service.
Next thing to setup is creating a service to start the VM’s as a service. When you don’t do that, the VM will stop the moment you log off.
In my old 14.04 server i already used a script based on the idea of Tommy Butler. I renamed and enhanced that script to vmstate.
To setup we need to do a number of things:
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