For the past few days at work I’ve been banging my head against my desk because I can’t see to get VMWare Server 2.0 to remember virtual machines after a reboot.
I tried many things including creating new directories and setting the permissions on them to 777 (accessible to all). None of those things helped. Then it dawned on me….maybe it was something else….
The what else was the file system I am using is a software RAID 5 array mounted to /export. This file system isn’t mounted until last in the boot process, after vmware started. Perhaps that was the problem. And after a restart of the vmware process it did indeed turn out to be the problem.
My quick and dirty solution is to restart the vmware service immediately after I mount /export.
This also indicates VMware does not dynamically read a data store but only once on boot and then just adds to it if you create a new Virtual Machine. Given my experience this doesn’t seem to be an ideal way to do this.