Solving You have started VMware Server with an out-of-date copy of the application.

If you get the following error message when running your VMWare Virtual Machine, please look at a great article by Anar Z. Taghiyev here.

You have started VMware Server with an out-of-date copy of the application. VMware Server cannot power on virtual machines using this copy (version 2.0.2). To power on this virtual machine, run VMware Server from the default location.

[In case the content got removed from the site, here it is.]

This afternoon after successfully running VMware 2.0.2 Server for a few days, my VM image would consistently fail to power on with the following error

Message from : You have started VMware Server with an out-of-date copy of the application. VMware Server cannot power on virtual machines using this copy (version 2.0.2). To power on this virtual machine, run VMware Server from the default location.

There were no updates applied to the server. The only change to the image itself was increased disk space. The server was registered with a valid license immediately following the installation a few days back.

After further investigating, the details of the actual problem and the workaround were found in the vmware-x.log files -

Jun 17 12:25:36.100: vmx| VMX_PowerOn: VMX build 203138, UI build -1
Jun 17 12:25:36.100: vmx| VMX_PowerOn: Error: VMX build 203138 doesn't match UI (no build number set, version 2.0.2). Failing power-on operation. Use vmx.noUIBuildNumberCheck to skip this check.
Jun 17 12:25:36.100: vmx| Msg_Post: Error
Jun 17 12:25:36.100: vmx| [msg.main.versionMismatch

After adding

vmx.noUIBuildNumberCheck = "TRUE"

to the VMware configuration file (.vmx), I was able to power on my VM image once again.


Cheers!