Monday, March 09, 2009

Invalid Virtual Machine

Today I tried to add a VMware VM created by a VMware workstation to my VMware Server 2 on Windows, but failed because it was considered to be invalid. VMware server told me "either the vmx file is corrupted or the VM was created using a newer version of VMware product." Seems both were not the case.

However, it turns out the vmx file could really be "corrupted". In vmx, the first line is
.encoding = "windows-1252"
After change it to be
.encoding = "UTF-8"
The VM is no longer considered to be invalid.

Then after I changed the "numvcpus" from 2 to 1, the VM is able to run on my VMware server, which unfortunately only has one single core CPU.

But interestingly, the original VM can run on a VMware server 2 on Linux.

I also need to change VM's network to be NAT instead of Bridged, and restart VM, to enable networking.

The guideline is that the virtual hardware for a particular Guest OS, such as the number of CPUs and the network type, has to be compatible with the hardware spec of the VMware server installation. For instance, you can not run a 2-CPU VM on a VMware server supporting only one CPU; and if there is no DHCP on the bridged network, then not surprisingly the VM can not acquire an IP if using the bridged network.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks a lot !

I had the same pb, i spent 1 day to find an issue, i was looking in the VM ware forums, but not solution worked.

Again, a great thanks

Stereon

Anonymous said...

Yes, Thank you.
I changed mine from:
.encoding = "ISO-8859-1"
to
.encoding = "UTF-8"
and it worked.

Anonymous said...

Great, it worked for me. Thanks for your help

Anonymous said...

BIG thanks!

Peter

Anonymous said...

You are the best!
it worked!
unicode="UTF-8"