Well it seems like Workstation itself cannot provide the listing of shut off VMs, even through their own VIX api. I'm not sure other VMWare products can provide it either, even though Server and ESX have the notion of Inventory.

As a last resort, I tried playing with libvirt, calling 'virsh define' in the hope that libvirt could register the VM in its own store and later on be able to list it, to no avail.

I think I'm done with Workstation. I'm a little disappointed with libvirt, which I thought it provided a uniform interface to various hypervisors. I should've read goals.html more thoroughly, as it is stated that:

libvirt should provide all APIs needed to do the management [...] within the limits of the support of the hypervisor for those operations.

It would be neat to create a table with all the libvirt commands and the supported hypervisors, showing which command is available to which hypervisor. This would help people wanting to change hypervisors while keeping their libvirt-based system by showing what will continue to work and what will need to be worked around in other ways, such as listing shut off VMs.

On Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 11:50 AM, None <balexis@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi, I am in the process of migrating a system that was using KVM to VMWare Workstation.

The original code needs to list all the domains available on the local machine, no matter what their state is. The problem is that the shut off domains are not shown by the virsh commands on the VMWare Workstation system.

On the KVM system, with one shut off domain, I get this output:
maxpower@sw ~$ virsh list --all
 Id Name                 State
----------------------------------
  - 00042-my-domain shut off

On the VMWare Workstation system, with one shut off domain, I get this output:
maxpower@sw2 ~ $ virsh -c vmwarews:///session list --all
 Id Name                 State
----------------------------------

As soon as I power on the machine in VMWare, it appears in the output as running:
maxpower@sw2 ~ $ virsh -c vmwarews:///session list --all
 Id Name                 State
----------------------------------
14063 my-domain-1      running


Is this a limitation of the Workstation driver? Is there a workaround of some sort that I haven't thought of? How can I get the entire domain list when using Workstation?

Thanks for your input,
Alexis