I want/need to start my VM instances from the command line, or as part of the host boot sequence.
Also, as part of a script manually launched on the host at will.
The obvious command for such case would be vmrun start with the nogui option, but this
fails consistently in my 3 hosts running VMware Workstation 7.1.4 under CentOS 5.6 (64 bit):
[root@japeto ~/vmware/juno]$ vmrun start juno.vmx nogui
Error: The virtual machine needs to be powered on
If I open the vmware GUI and use the point+click method everything works fine. In fact, once a VM instance has been started this way, then the vmrun start … nogui works at it should for other VM instances residing in the same host.
But this doesn't help for a headless operation where I can only access the host via ssh.
Any hints ? Thanks.
Best Answer
Have you verified that the modules are loading correctly?
the vmrun command doesn't always auto-load the modules successfully.
load them manually (/etc/init.d/vmware start) and try vmrun again.