VMWare and Timing Out

VMWare and Console Timeouts

Summary

Avoiding the  “Cannot access virtual machine console. The request timed out” message in VMWare Server Console pane

Disclaimer

This explains how to get around a problem it seems a few people have in VMWare Server. I’ve no idea why it helps but it does !

My Problem

Today I’ve been using VMWare Server for the first time. I set up a new Virtual Machine and wanted to boot Ubuntu Server as a VM. The log messages seemed to suggest everything was going well but when I tried to use the Console within the VMWare Server to configure my new guest OS I would get the message “Cannot access virtual machine console. The request timed out” … again … and … again … and … again ! Very frustrating.

I tried a lot of things – read a lot of documentation and then I stumbled on a way around the problem.

Solution

Within the VMWare Server control panel is a link “Generate Virtual Machine Shortcut”. I’m not sure why I did this but I used that option to generate a URL and then loaded the URL into a different browser. The resulting screen looks pretty similar to the VMWare Server control panel I’d been staring at for a while but for some reason when I tried to use the console it just worked !

As I say I don’t know why but I hope it helps someone who’s bashing their head against this.

Environment

For what it’s worth I’m using Vista Ultimate as the host OS, Ubuntu 8.4.4 Server as the guest OS and VMWare Server 2.0.2.