Sometimes, Installation for Workstation for Linux on Fedora fails on building the VMMON and VMNET modules. Usually, we will be able to see this error from the logs.

This issue can happen when vmware-host-modules is missing.

Here at Ibmi Media, as part of our Server Management Services, we regularly help our Customers to resolve VMware errors.

Nature of VMware error "Failed to build vmmon" ?

When reviewing the log you see the following errors for the VMMON and VMNET modules:

2018-09-17T12:00:00.000+01:00| vthread-1| W100: Failed to build vmmon.  Failed to execute the build command.
2018-09-17T12:00:00.000+01:00| vthread-1| W100: Failed to build vmnet.  Failed to execute the build command.

What is the cause for VMware error "Failed to build vmmon" ?

Linux for Workstation requires additional packages and steps in order to complete installation. The following steps have been tested on Fedora 28 and Fedora 29 but otherwise would be generally applicable to other Linux distributions. Please adjust for your specific version.

How to resolve VMware error "Failed to build vmmon" ?

To successfully install the product we can use the following steps:

1. If we have made an attempt to install Workstation earlier, we must uninstall it first using the following commands in the product documentation:

$ vmware-installer -u vmware-workstation

2. After that we can install the elfutils-libelf-devel package via terminal. On Fedora, this is can be done with the following command or similar:

$ sudo dnf install elfutils-libelf-devel

3. The VMMON and VMNET kernel modules are built on the first launch of Workstation. Before launching a workstation, we must ensure that the Linux distribution’s kernel development and header packages are installed. On Fedora or similar We can do this with the following command:

$ sudo yum install kernel-headers-`uname -r` kernel-devel-`uname -r`

4. After that, we can proceed with the installation of Workstation for Linux.

Note: Workstation will attempt to auto-detect the path to the kernel development and header packages at the end of the product installation. If we successfully installed the packages and they are not found we must check our distros documentation for the location of these files.

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