Let me confess one thing first: I am running Server, and hence all my VMs, on XP Pro so I realise that isn't an officially supported configuration.
Has anyone had any problems with frequent "sort of crashes" (I'll explain the "sort of" in a minute) when running Server on one machine and then connecting to it remotely over a LAN via VMware Server Console (henceforth VSC for brevity) running on XP Pro? Here is what I'm seeing.....
I mostly have 2 VMs running on my Server, one Suse 10 and the other Fedora FC4. My machine running Server is headless (no keyboard or mouse) so I'm using VSC on another PC to access my VM consoles. I run in QuickSwitch mode with both VM screens set at 800x600 16 bit colour so in VSC I have 3 tabs, one "Home" tab and one tab for each VM.
I frequently (probably every 5 minutes or so) get a lock-up in the tab that I am currently working in. Basically it stops responding. If I release the mouse then I can select the tab for the other virtual machine or the Home tab and they continue to function perfectly. Similarly, if I hop to my Server machine (using XP remote desktop) and fire up a local VSC then it accesses the "locked up" VM just fine which seems to prove pretty conclusively that the lockup is in my remote VCS and not the VM itself. During this lockup I can still use the remote VCS and can flick backwards and forwards between the 2 VM tabs (and the Home tab), it's just that any time I click the mouse into the screen of the locked up tab then it freezes until I release it again with ctrl-alt.
Eventually, after anything from 10 seconds up to a couple of minutes, I get a windows pop-up message on the screen of the PC where I'm running my remote VCS that says "VMware Server Console unrecoverable error: (mks) ASSERT F(4414):2722 ..." and then just some stuff about where the log files and core dumps have been stored. At this point I can just dismiss the message and then the contents of the locked up tab go black but once I click into the blacked out screen then it refreshes with the contents of the VM's console and the tab is back to life. This is what I meant by a "sort of crash" earlier, I get a fairly disturbing message popping up but the VCS program never actually bombs out. I assume the pop-up message is from the VMware software developers since I remember ASSERTS well as a debug tool from my days as a kernel developer.
There is no pattern to which VM this happens in, it happens in all of them that I've tried. I have filed a support ticket but I'm hoping that VMware won't just close it out because the Server side of my setup is running on an unsupported platform. Given that the problem seems to be occuring on the remote VCS end, where XP Pro is a supported platform, then I'm hoping they will find a bug in VCS that can be fixed (although I do accept that the problem could originate with some bad protocol getting spat out of the Server end which would then put the attention back on the OS on which I am running Server). I have to say though that so far I have been very impressed with VMware support staff, I've filed a few minor things and have got very quick responses from real people that makes me think they really are listening.
Anyway, I'd be very interested to know if anyone else is seeing anything like this. For me it's the only thing that's spoiling a near-perfect experience with this beta. I love the Remote Server Console capability.
\- Julian
