Greetings... Recently I experienced a power failure at my office when I was running two different virtual machines. Upon restarting, I am unable to connect to the machines as VMWare tells me "This virutal machine appears to be in use." If I press the "Take Ownership" button, it immediantely returns with a dialog box indicating "Taking ownership of this virtual machine failed." How do I unlock these machines?
If you need further convincing the fix is that simple, see also my short video that demonstrates the fix. It'd seem that VMware would address this issue with a better recovery technique, given it's an error I've seen occasionally for many years myself. But hey, at least the fix is well documented!
This issue already bit me once on Windows 10 and VMware Workstation 12, and the same fix worked just fine.
This issue still persists, but good news, fix above still works, even right through the latest VMware Workstation 12.5! See Ruud van Zundert's comment below.
This fix apparently still works with VMware Workstation 14, see also release notes. The latest point release is 14.1.1.
This comment was left below that helps confirm this fix still works with Workstation 14. Thank you, Oh.Y.Not!