Home  
  Projects  
  About Us  
  Blog  
     
     
   
   
   
   

Updates and Solutions

  VMWare - Cannot find a valid peer process to connect to
      Monday, February 23, 2009

I work a lot with VMWare Workstation, and tonight while I was doing some work on a lab environment, I realized that the VM containing my domain controller was not running. It had been running earlier, but now it was not. When I tried to start it again, I got the message "Cannot find a valid peer process to connect to". Google turned up all sorts of things, including people who said that everything was fine after they rebooted the host machine. Since I'm usually juggling three or four VMs at a time and each one takes around 8-10 minutes to shut down, I wasn't about to waste my time with that.

Instead I went into Task Manager and looked at the processes. I currently had two VMs running, one Windows 2003 server with Data Protection Manager that I'd given 1.5gb of memory to, and an Exchange 2007 server that I'd given 3gb to. In the Processes list, I could see three instances of vmware-vmx.exe, and two of them had a Peak Working Set that matched the amounts of ram that I'd allocated them. The remaining one showed a working set of 1.2gb, around the amount I'd allocated to the domain controller. Once I killed that process, I was then able to fire up that VM. Apparently it had crashed, but it had left a ghost process behind that was keeping that VM from starting up again.

So that's an easier way to go about it than rebooting your host workstation. Worked for me, but it might not work for you.
 
Comments:
I think I've experienced the same.

Think it's sufficiant to just restart the vmware auth service.

I've experienced this once and was quite franticly restarting services and reconnecting the vmware workstation console...
 
Deleting an old snapshot seemed to clear the issue... after doing this I was able to start the VM with the freshest snapshot (which was being denied with that "Cannot find a valid peer process to connect to" pop-up window).

I'm on CentOS 5.7/64 bit, launching also a CentOS 5.7/64 VM with VMWare Workstation 8.0

It would seem that having "too many" snapshots is an issue. In this case, there were some 6 of them - so not that many...
BTW deleting lock files or restarting the host didn't help. Got always :
Loop on signal 11 -- tid 4409 at 0x3616407638.
Error: Unknown error
when trying to launch the VM using vmrun start
 
Awesome! Running on darwin, and a simple

ps -ef | grep vm

will point you to any ghost processes (parent id 1). kill -9 that vmware-vmx process and i was golden. thanks for the tip!
 
This totally helped me. It was an existing process running. ps -ef | grep vmx showed the processes and killing the ghost one allowed me to boot up my VM. Thank you.
 
Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]





<< Home