When running VMware 14 (14.0.0) from the command line, I noticed the following message:

$ vmware
Fail to open executable: No such file or directory

Further research suggested that this ‘missing’ item was in fact /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libvmware-unity-helper.so/libvmware-unity-helper.so, which is indeed not included with VMware 14.0.0..

I found a copy of this in an old backup, and tried to restore it to the current VMware library tree, and discovered that it had further VMware library dependencies – which were also in the old backup:

libvmwarebase.so.0
libvmwareui.so.0
libgvmomi.so.0
libview.so.3
libgcrypt.so.11
libgcr.so.0
libgck.so.0

This was OK, so far, but the last dependency was

[AppLoader] Fail to load the library. /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libstdc++.so.6/libstdc++.so.6: version `GLIBCXX_3.4.21' not found (required by /lib64/libgdkmm-2.4.so.1)

– which was a show-stopper, as this would cause a conflict with the existing VMware 14 version of that file…

So, I backed out all the file/library moves, and will never know if any of this would have made a real difference to any of the performance issues being reported.      I had taken a complete backup of all my VMs before the upgrade, and have considered reverting to 12.5.7 (even with all the ‘workarounds’ needed), but – so far – have only experienced some sluggishness in the Windows 7 VM operation, so I am staying with 14.0.0, and hoping that 14.0.1 is released soon!

Robert Gadsdon   October 15, 2017..