I had a *facepalm* moment with VMWare Player yesterday and solved it today so thought I'd share it - Either that helps someone out or makes someone laugh at my stupidity (either way it's a positive post).
I've recently been getting things deployed to my brand new Surface Pro 3 and by and large it's been painless - almost everything Windows 8'y was done instantly because of the settings sync between my Surface Pro 1 and my various desktop and R&D VMs using the same Microsoft Live ID. It's optional of course but I found that it makes a positive difference1.
The only installs I've had to do are the standard laptop / desktop installs, e.g. Visual Studio, Achimate, EA, Office, etc... And VMWare Player2.
None of these were an issue but when trying to spin up a VM I kept getting an error message telling me that there wasn't sufficient memory for the VM guest. I'd already moved VMX across from old Surface or installed new VM's from scratch so it wasn't happening all the time.
I thought that was a bit strange as my Linux guests tend to have 512Mb RAM for sandboxes and up to around 2Gb for intensive operators (such as some research tools on Kali). With 8Gb of RAM on SP3 and a few days researching memory cache in Win8.1 I was pretty confident that this wasn't the real issue.
Which of course it wasn't. Finally found this conversation chain on the VMWare forums.
Well that made a lot of sense. Should have checked UAC issues out first. I changed the application start-up options via context menu properties on %installPahth%\vmplayer.exe to run as administrator ... restart machine and - lo and behold - it seems to kick it into touch.
Hope that saves someone else the time spent on the problem :)
1: After testing local accounts that have no misty inference I'm happy with the classic Windows accounts in 8.1 too, but I'll save that for a Hanselmann-style post at a later date.
2: Don't forget to remove the Hyper-V role if you want to use VMWare Player. Hyper-V doesn't play well with Linux + certain devices so wasn't an option for me on my Surface. Hyper-V is brilliant for Windows-flavoured guests though, may cover that in another post too...
