Error while trying to getstate of VM
Recently a VM on a ESX host (version 2.5.3) refused to power on.
From the Service Console i tried to getstate:
vmware-cmd <.vmx-file> getstate
but all I got was an error:
/usr/bin/vmware-cmd: Could not connect to VM <.vmx-file> (VMControl error -14: Unexpected response from vmware-authd: Error connecting to /usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware-vmx process.)
As it turned out the problem was that an old process was still existing and it was convinced it was running the VM already, which it was not.
# grep -r ".vmx" /proc/vmware/
extract the VM’s PID from the output and
# kill -9 <PID> # vmware-cmd <.vmx-file> getstate
should now produce a more reasonable output. If you want to power on the VM da a:
# vmware-cmd <.vmx-file> start