I tried to setup VMWare today, to be able to have some virtual machines to test random stuff.

My laptop only has a small HD, so I want to have all the VM stuff on my huge external USB drive. Also I only use them occasionally, so that pretty much rules out Xen. So I decided to give VMWare a try.

VMWare has always been a desaster installation-wise. It took me like 5 runs to get it installed properly; you need to apply some patches or it won’t work with current kernels etc. After these tries it had installed without any further error messages and the GUI also came up easily.

However none of the VMs I created did anything; apparently they’re supposed to at least show some BIOS like screen. Instead I only get the error message “Unable to change virtual machine power state: The process exited with an error: End of error message.”

And of course it doesn’t tell me which process or anything else that could help debugging it.

Shutdown also doesn’t work properly - stopping vmware leaves a vmware-serverd process running that needs to be killed with -9.

As usual, commercial software is totally disappointing.

[Update: so neither the vmmon shipped with VMWare nor the one from vmware-any-any-update108 worked; keep your eyes open for update109. I managed to patch vmmon myself, in include/compat_kernel.h move the if/else part up to the front, as it is in update108.]