Jan 5, 2011

VMware Server weirdness

Virtual machine working flawlessly on my PC, but adding the same image on another machine fails with some unrelated log entries:
...\VMware\VMware Server\hostd-0.log


[xxxx 'Vmsvc' 8376 info] Foundry_CreateEx failed: Error: (4002) Cannot read the virtual machine configuration file[xxxx 'vm:C:\Virtual Machines\xxx\xxx.vmx' 8376 info] Failed to load virtual machine.
[xxxx 'vm:C:\Virtual Machines\xxx\xxx.vmx' 8376 info] Failed to load virtual machine. Marking as unavailable: vim.fault.InvalidVmConfig

The difference is in the default system locale, which is reflected in .vmx and(!) .vmdk:
machine 1: 
.vmx:
.encoding = "windows-1251"
.vmdk:
ddb.encoding = "windows-1251"

machine 2 .vmx:
.encoding = "windows-1255"
.vmdk:
ddb.encoding = "windows-1255"

VMware server version: 2.0, running on Windows XP/Windows 7

Hint:
Editing .vmdk file is not trivial on windows, most editors will fail to handle multi gigabyte files, you can use biew/beye utility for this.

2 comments:

LCSONTOS said...

Hi,

I have exactly the same issue (my encoding in the VMX file is windows-1252 and it should be windows-1250). How have you solved the encoding problem above?

Unknown said...

I did not found a documented proper way to handle it.
But changing this value inside .VMX and .VMDK files did work for me.

VMDK file might be a huge binary, you'd need to use something like beye utility for that.