VMware Server 2 – ‘Unknown (Inaccessible)’ virtual machines running from external hard drive

I’ve started to play around with VMware Server 2 to leverage 64bit from my CPU for virtualisation.

On a few occasions I have logged onto the VMware admin and my virtual machines show as ‘unknown (Inaccessible)’ as shown below:

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I have noticed that if you don’t connect your external hard drive prior to booting the laptop you will have this issue. VMware does not seem to like plugging in the hard drive after boot up and does not detect it although the OS can happily see it and read/write to and from it.

Workaround

I’m bound not to remember to insert my drive on every boot as I may not have planned to fire up the VM’s during the duration. So I have found that if you insert your external hard drive after boot and then go to services and restart the ‘VMware Host Agent’ service as shown below:

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Rebooting of this service will detect your VM’s next time you log into the VMware web admin.

That saves 10 minutes closing down all my programs and rebooting (and forgetting what I was doing before rebooting :-)).

Hope that's of some use to you, please do leave a comment so I know I'm blogging about something you find useful!

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