Tuesday 25 March 2008

Can't Connect to Console of VMs

I had everything built and running VMWare Server. Good. So I copied all the VMs I'd built when I was running VMWare on my desktop over to the new server. I started a few, and they were running fine. I could connect to the Zenoss console on one of them, and could ping both. However, all I got was a black screen when I tried to look at the console of the VM using VMWare Console.

The VMWare documentation recommended using the version of VMWare Console program specific to the server you're running. I grumbled a bit and re-installed (which was actually quite easy), then tried viewing the console of my VMs again. I still got a black screen, but I also got an error message saying that the .vmx file had to have execute permission for the user running the VMWare Console. I checked the .vmx files and sure enough, because of the way I copied them everything had 0644 permissions.

So I cd'd to the directory where all the VM directories were and typed:

find . -name "*.vmx" -exec chmod u+x \{} \;

That worked because the user connecting with VMWare Console is the same one that owned all the files. You'll have to do something slightly different if that's not the case.

Now they work fine.

1 comment:

harald said...

Ya, that 'execute bit' on a config file annoys me too.

The only thing I can think of is that they wanted an easy way to disable a VM without using the console...