Here I document what I did to get some VMs appearing in a user's vmware-server-console list when they previously were only available to a different user.
Note: Read this first: Understanding Permissions and Virtual Machines.
Note that I'm not sure all steps are necessary, but they work and that's good enough for me. Don't do this without further research if you're in a multi-user environment or one that requires more security than a single user system accessing vmware locally (i.e. via localhost).
In particular, I'm not sure the third or fourth steps are necessary. Try them one by one, in order. Remember to restart vmware every time you make a change (and ensure you've no vmware daemons running - I had to kill mine because the init script failed to stop it).
- Change ownership / permission of a VM's configuration file (.vmx) so that the user/group has read and write permission.
- Change the ownership / permission of the VM's directory as above.
- Recursively change the ownership / permission of all the VM's files as above.
- Edit /etc/vmware/vm-list-private so that the users mentioned at the end of every line correspond to the user you want to grant access.
