Hi. I am running VMware Workstation 9.0.1 build-894247 on 30 windows7 hosts in a university lab environment. A wide variety of Windows and Ubuntu virtual machines can be run on the physical machines. We control all updating so the config.ini file in c:\documents and settings\all users\vmware\vmware workstation is set to the following values for all machines:
installerDefaults.autoSoftwareUpdateEnabled = "no"
installerDefaults.autoSoftwareUpdateEnabled.epoch = "26849"
installerDefaults.componentDownloadEnabled = "no"
installerDefaults.dataCollectionEnabled = "no"
installerDefaults.dataCollectionEnabled.epoch = "26849"
authd.client.port = "902"
authd.proxy.vim = "vmware-hostd:hostd-vmdb"
authd.proxy.nfc = "vmware-hostd:ha-nfc"
Despite these settings, we are experience an intermitent issue where the auto update process initiates for certain users on certain workstations and fails part way through the installation. VMware Workstation continues to work after the installation failure but once the workstation is rebooted it stops working and the following error is issues upon trying to open a virtual machine: "Unable to open kernel device '\\.\Global\vmx86: The system cannot find the file specified. Did you reboot after installing VMware workstation? Failed to Initialize monitor device"
In researching the problem, we found that the failed installation is deleting several files including vmx86.sys. It appears that after the boot, services that are dependent on those files cannot start which causes the above error when users try to open a virtual machine. As a work around we repair the installation and the problem is fixed.
This is a highly inconsistent problem. It can happen to a user on one workstation and then they sign on to another workstation and it not happen on that one. All workstations were built from the same image and all updating is turned off. I have attached the vminst.log which was recently produced when the issue occurred.
My goal is to stop the autoupdate process from initiating. We rebuild all host images at the end of each semester, so my goal is to have NO auto updating during semesters.
I am baffled so any insight you can offer would be greatly appreciated.
Cheers,