I started getting this error "Cannot find a valid peer process to connect to" when attempting to resume a suspended virtual machine. For whatever reason, this happened after a I have used acronis disk director to merge a partition to the partition on which the visrtual machines reside to gain more space. It could be only a conincidence though.
Anyway, After trying a few times to resume/power on the vm and also restarting vmware client (VMWare workstation ACE edition) I closed the workstation, restarted all services one by one and then started up the workstation again. I found the virtual machine powered on (in the powered on list) but not viewable. if I took a screenshot it clearly showed it was running. So, since I could not interact with the machine, I suspended it again, then resumed and everything was back to normal.
This happened once yesterday and once just now. In both times I’ve done the above steps and got the same results so it appears this is a workaround the problem.
It just happened again, out of the blue.
I confirm: closing vmware client, restarting all vmware services one by one, and I also started the cmware agent service (not sure if it’s needed, next time I won’t start it and will confirm). Then starting the vmware client again will show the machine powered on but wil giv eyou the buttons to suspend it. clicking suspend and then resume, will get the machine up, running and showing again.
I confirm, starting vmware agent service is not required. next time I’ll try to see the minimum services that need ot be restarted for the fix to kick in.
I’ve read it all, but kind of hard to understand the problem, I’ll be more technomous after this. (^_^)
this time I only restarted the vmware mount manager service and then the vmware authorization service. my hunch is that only the latter one is sufficient to be restarted for the fix to kick in, so I’ll test that next time.
restarting just the vmware authorization service is sufficient and the only needed one. After restarting that service, and starting the vmware client, the virtual machine that was resumed and caused the error will show up running and will be interactive, as if nothing happened. so there won’t be a need to suspend and resume it again as I said initially.
so that’s solved
I would note that sometimes, as it just happened to me, you start vmware client, then start a suspended VM and it shows up after finishing loading as “Unkown” and black screen.
At this stage you close vmware client, go to start-run: services.msc and restart the vmware authorization service. then you start the vmware client again and you have, to this writing, 2 possible scenarios:
- your virtual machine appears running and displayed correctly and all is fine
- your virtual machine appears running (it is in the power on list and having the little green play button on it) but it does not display and opening it also doesn’t show it running. in this case you just click suspend and then resume again.
so note that at least in the second case, after you resumed it you will probably not see it in the powered on list, although it is powered on, dowing up ok and you can use it just fine. It is just another glitvh.
just to be clear, I am talking about vmware workstation 6.0.4 ACE edition running on win XP SP2, no windows update and a handfull of patches required by some applications.
I had similar problem: my VM was in a suspended state; started VMWare Player; got the same error message as you. I deleted the .vmss file, which stores the machine memory state (it’s like a power cut to a physical machine), and that fixed the problem. I read that .vmem stores the paging file (ie memory that was on disk at suspend time) but I didn’t have to touch that one.