VmWare Server not starting after reboot

Lately I gave a go to VmWare Server. After installing it, I pretty enjoyed installing virtual machines from my desktop environment.

Unfortunately, when I rebooted my computer, I could not used VMware Server Console anymore. This was actually due to the fact that vmware-serverd could not start properly and resulted in configuring vmware as unconfigured.

After enjoying tweaking around with vmware, I was quite gutted when after a physical machine reboot, vmware server was not working anymore.

I was getting this message when I was launching VMware Server Console from the command line:

$ vmware
vmware is installed, but it has not been (correctly) configured
for this system. To (re-)configure it, invoke the following command:
/usr/bin/vmware-config.pl.

Stopping /etc/init.d/vmware resulted in:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/vmware stop
Stopping VMware services:
Virtual machine monitor failed
Bridged networking on /dev/vmnet0 done
DHCP server on /dev/vmnet1 done
Host-only networking on /dev/vmnet1 done
DHCP server on /dev/vmnet8 done
NAT service on /dev/vmnet8 done
Host-only networking on /dev/vmnet8 done
Virtual ethernet failed

Starting /etc/init.d/vmware resulted in:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/vmware start
vmware is installed, but it has not been (correctly) configured
for this system. To (re-)configure it, invoke the following command:
/usr/bin/vmware-config.pl.

Then I decided to trace vmware process to get to know where the process was actually dying. After stracing vmware

$ strace vmware

, I found out that vmware was checking for a specific file: /etc/vmware/not_configured.

Well, the name was explicit enough… vmware actually create /etc/vmware/not_configured when it cannot start for any reasons.

I removed that file, but still, when I started vmware, the daemon did not start :s

$ sudo /etc/init.d/vmware start
Starting VMware services:
Virtual machine monitor done
Virtual ethernet done
Bridged networking on /dev/vmnet0 done
Host-only networking on /dev/vmnet1 (background) done
Bridged networking on /dev/vmnet2 done
Host-only networking on /dev/vmnet8 (background) done
NAT service on /dev/vmnet8 done
Virtual ethernet failed

After some time, I actually found out that this failure was actually due to an older installation of vmware-player. Even though I removed it at the time, vmware-player left /etc/init.d/vmware-player to start on boot up :s…. and as a result, messed everything up.

To sort this out, you need to remove vmware-player service simply run:

$ sudo update-rc.d -f vmware-player remove

Don’t forget to remove /etc/vmware/not_configured, if it is still there, before you reboot

This actually will prevent vmware-player from being started at boot time and on next reboot, vmware should be starting just fine :).

Hope this helps 😉