VMware Server - vmrun list command

This is a quick how to article on using some basic command line tools to administer VMware server 2 virtual machines running on a Linux system. In my case I am running Vmware Server on Centos 5.4 but I'm sure this will be very similar if not exactly the same on other versions of Linux.

Anyway here is the small problem I ran into. I wanted to get a list of running virtual machines on my centos server so I used the command

vmrun list

If memory serves me corretly this used to spit back a list of the running vms. However the above command now returns

Error: Malformed hostname parameter. For the given service provider, the hostname must be a URL, in the form https://:/sdk

The correct command that did work was

vmrun -h https://localhost:8333/sdk -u adminusername -p adminpassword list

The above command would then produce the following output.

Total running VMs: 1
[standard] XPPro/XPPro.vmx

The command above can be adjusted accordingly run other functions on the vm as well (start, stop, pause, etc...). Please see the full documentation on the vmware.com website.

I not sure when the command changed (perhaps for better security in the latest vmware server software) but the above steps now get me to where I need to be.

Hope this helps someone else.

For other VMware articles please click here


Labels: , , ,