I’ve been using VMware Workstation 16 for a long time. Recently, I realize that sometimes my vmware virtual machines cannot start/resume.

The error message is:

Power on failure messages: The operation was cancelled by the user
Cannot open the disk 'X:\VMS\xxxxx\xxxxx-cl1.vmdk' or one of the snapshot disks it depends on.
Module 'Disk' power on failed.
Failed to start the virtual machine.

There was not much detailed information on the error and it scared me out as I need my  VMs to work.

I checked there was no .lck file under the VM folder. And later I finally found out that this was caused by my Backblaze when it was backing up my vmdk files and VMware could not exclusively lock the vmdk files when it is being read by Backblaze. (I think by default Backblaze does not backup vmdk files but I manually included them as I need them to be backed up.)

If you experience similar issues, you can simply pause Backblaze backup before starting your VMware VM.

 

If the above information does not solve your problem, you may also check VMware’s official knowledge base on this topic:

Powering on a virtual machine fails with the error: Cannot open the disk (1038189)

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1038189