VMWare Server woes – Host Agent Service Terminated

So its a Sunday. I worked Saturday. I’ve got something to finish for Monday. Really not in the mood for any hassles. Which is the perfect time for one of those totally inexplicable and massively irritating PC errors to crop up and spoil any chance of progress. Damn these computer things annoy me – I mean you would never put up with this sort of behaviour from your TV or fridge, they would be in a skip by now.

Sigh VMWare Server 2.0 won’t start – look in event logs and find

The VMWare Host Agent service Terminated with service-specifc error %%-1

Helpful. Check the VMWare log files – where the hell are they hidden now? On Windows 7 (and presumably 2008 R2)  its the hidden directory

c:ProgramDataVMWareVMWare Server

In the latest hostd-*.log file I see a PANIC!

Yup, no kidding.

[2010-10-03 11:39:05.562 'App' 5692 panic] error: not well-formed (invalid token)

[2010-10-03 11:39:05.562 'App' 5692 panic] backtrace:(backtraces not supported)

[2010-10-03 11:39:05.562 'App' 5692 info] Win32 service stopped

c:ProgramDataVMWareVMWare Serverhostd

and it turned out that datastores.xml was empty – wtf?

I deleted it and restarted VMWare Host Agent service and it started up ok – WTF!?

Datastores – so that will be where VMWare stores the VM’s so have to reset that again and I discover that Windows 7 (presumably during one of the almost daily forced updates)  has decided to remap my V: drive (Virtual Machines, geddit?) to D:

WTF!?!?!

So between Windows remapping drives and VMWare feaking out if it can’t find the folder location for saved VM’s (what about a “can’t find file” dialog VMWare?) that’s 2 hrs of my Sunday gone.

Tags: Rant