All,
I spent several days combing the streets for a solution to this problem and thought id share.
My System
AMD Phenom 9850 Quadcore (2.5 ghz)
4 GB Ram
Fedora Core 10, 64 bit edition, all YUM updates
Kernel ver 2.6.27.29-170.2.78.fc10.x86_64 (as of this writing)
I have dual nics in this machine and initially wanted to dedicate one of them (eth1) for VMware bridged use (i dont use NAT or host only networking ). I believe this ultimately caused some of my problems so i am now only using the main eth0
After installing Vmware Server 2.0.1 several times, I seemed to have random problems accessing the Vmware WebAccess console (i would get a blank page saying loading in the title bar). I checked all the basics (host file, no firewalls etc) and eventually ended up doing this to solve my problem
1. My Host file looks like this:
127.0.0.1 superspartan64 localhost.localdomain localhost
192.168.1.2 superspartan64
2. I COMPLETELY removed vmware first using the vmware-uninstall.pl script and then using a custom script i wrote (to REALLY clean the bugger off the system). That script is cleanVmware.sh:
rm -rf /etc/vmware
rm -rf /etc/pam.d/vmware*
rm -rf /var/run/vmware*
rm -rf /var/lib/vmware
rm -rf /var/log/vmware
rm -rf /usr/lib/vmware
rm -rf /etc/rc.d/init.d/vmware*
rm -rf /tmp/web?ccess*
3. I reboot the system and made sure nothing was listening (netstat -na | grep LIST) and nothing was running (ps -ef | grep vm)
4. I then reinstalled the 64 bit version of vmware again. This time i installed everything to /usr/local/vmware/bin and /usr/local/vmware/sbin (i doubt this matters but im just being thorough in my problem resolution steps)
5. When prompted for networking I selected ONLY bridged networking and opted out of Host Only and NAT
5b. ALSO (and this may be unrelated) I selected new ports for the console and http access ports (902, 8222 and 8333). I used 9020, 9222 and 9333 respectively
6. I completed the install (entered the serial and let the various modules compile successfully)
7. At this point i attempted a /etc/init.d/vmware stop and noticed that not all of the vmware related processes shut down. In particular, vmware-hostd
( My theory is that this process NEVER cleanly shut down and the various starts and stops i was doing caused compound hanging errors. I was looking at some of the clutter in /var/run/vmware and noticed an a** load of session links). I believe these totally bogged up my Vmware Web Access somehow.
8.To fix the above problem, i modified /etc/init.d/vmware as follows: (around line 898 where it says):
Stop host agent
vmware_stop_hostd()
Underneath where it says vmware_run_vmsh_cmd I added the following lines:
pkill -9 vm
rm -rf /var/run/vmware/hostd.PID
9. Now if you attempt to do a /etc/init.d/vmware stop the hostd service gets (albeit ungracefully) killed and the PID file removed. When you restart It all starts back up again
.......My vmware 2.0.1 system and access to the web interface seems to be fairly stable so far. If anyone wants to expand upon this please do so. Vmware definetely needs to get this resolved quick!
Also in case anyone is interested, Here is a great article on optimizing vmware server 2.x . I got about a 40% performance increase (approx) after implementing these tuning changes
Vmware Performance Tuning Primer
Thanks all
-roadhog