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Investigating if a hosted virtual machine is powered on

Purpose

This article guides you through the process of determining if a virtual machine is powered on. In some cases this is information which cannot be determined just by looking at the VMware graphical interface. The steps outlined here help eliminate any uncertainty over the status of a virtual machine. The article also allows you to determine the process ID (PID) of a powered on virtual machine.

Resolution

The method of determining the power status of a virtual machine differs between Windows and Unix style hosts (ie. Linux and Mac OS X). Refer to the section that matches your host operating system. If you have more than one host that may be responsible for having a virtual machine powered on, verify the status of the virtual machine on each of the host systems.
 
Note: For the following procedures, results may not be accurate unless you are logged in as a user with either Administrator rights or root privileges.

Determining if a virtual machine is powered on by a Windows host

To determine if a virtual machine is powered on by a Windows host:

  1. Run the Task Manager:
    1. Click Start > Run.
    2. Type taskmgr and click OK.

      Note: If you are running a version of Windows where this command does not work, you must find a utility that is capable of displaying processes running on your system. Please see Additional Information section. Follow the instructions for the application's use and go to step 4.

  2. Click the Processes tab.

  3. The Image Name column is sorted alphabetically. If the column is not, click on the Image Name text at the top of the column.

  4. Look for a process named vmware-vmx.exe. If you do not see the process then there are no virtual machines that have been powered on by this host.

    Note: If you suspect that another host may have the virtual machine powered on, like when the virtual machine files are located on a network share that multiple hosts can access, then follow this document on each of those hosts.

  5. If there is a process named vmware-vmx.exe in the process list then there is a virtual machine that is currently powered on. If there is only a single virtual machine on this host then that is the machine that is on. If there is more than one virtual machine on this host, you must still determine if the virtual machine whose power state is in question is actually powered on.

  6. If you are using Task Manager and do not see a column named PID:

    1. Click View > Select Columns.
    2. Click the box labelled PID (Process Identifier).
    3. Click OK.

  7. Write down the PID of any vmware-vmx.exe entry.

  8. In Windows Explorer, navigate to the directory where the virtual machine's files are located. If you are not sure of the location of the virtual machine's files, see Locating a hosted virtual machine's files (1003880).

  9. Open the file vmware.log in a text editor, such as wordpad or notepad. On the first line of this file, look for the text pid=xxxx, where xxxx is actually a number. If this number does not match one of the numbers from step 7, then the virtual machine in question is not powered on by this host.

    Note: If you suspect that another host may have the virtual machine powered on, like when the virtual machine files are located on a network share that multiple hosts can access, follow this document for each of those hosts.

 

Determining if a virtual machine is powered on by a Linux or Mac OS X host

To determine if a virtual machine is powered on by a Linux or Mac OS host:

  1. Open a shell prompt. For further information, see Opening a command or shell prompt (1003892).
  2. Issue the following command:

    ps aux | grep vmware-vmx

  3. If there is one or more process named vmware-vmx in the results, look for the directory path to all of the virtual machines that are powered on in the listing. If there is no process named vmware-vmx , or if none of the directory paths associated with vmware-vmx process entries match that of the virtual machine in question, then it is not powered on by this host.

    Notes:
    • If you suspect that another host may have the virtual machine powered on, like when the virtual machine files are located on a network share that multiple hosts can access, follow this document on each of those hosts.
    • The PID of any powered on virtual machine as listed in step 2 can be determined by looking at the number from the 2nd column.

 

Additional Information

An alternate utility for showing processes running on a Windows computer, supported by Microsoft, is called pslist .  You can locate it by going to http://technet.microsoft.com/ , and entering pslist into the search box.
 
To use pslist , once downloaded, unzip it into a folder, then open a command prompt.  For more information, see Opening a command or shell prompt (1003892).
 
At the command prompt, navigate to the directory where the utility was saved.  When in that directory, look for any process named vmware-vmx.exe .  For example, if pslist is located on drive C: and in the temp directory, the following commands would be issued:
 
C:\>cd \temp
C:\Temp>pslist vmware-vmx

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