I built a new server designed for use as an on-demand server. It is normally turned off, and only brought for special CPU intensive tasks, like ripping and transcoding DVD’s and to host VM’s for special projects. I wanted the ability to have the machine nicely suspend VM’s during shutdown. vmrun from the VIX package supports this, but it failed to install and run on my ubuntu box. The first time I installed it it failed. Trying the install a 2nd time allowed it to install, but I kept receiving an error message when trying to start up the VM’s from the command line.

Unable to connect to host.
Error: The specified version was not found

It seems that VMware VIX version 1.9.1 does not support VMware Player version 3.1.2

To make this work, you need to tell vix that about VMware player version 3.1.2

Modify the /usr/lib/vmware-vix/viwrapper-config.txt file and add your version of player by adding the following line, below other player version neer the bottom of the file.

player 13 vmdb 3.1.2 Workstation-7.1.0

Thats all there is too it, vmrun now works as expected!

Versions of the software that I currently have installed:

Ubuntu Server 64 Bit 10.04.1
VMware-Player-3.1.2-301548.x86_64
VMware-VIX-1.9.1-282343.x86_64