VMWare Server: The VMware Host Agent service terminated with service-specific error 4294967295 (0xFFFFFFFF).

Written by

Published on 18/2/2009 - Read in about 2 min (218 words)

This article is now 14 years old! It is highly likely that this information is out of date and the author will have completely forgotten about it. Please take care when following any guidance to ensure you have up-to-date recommendations.

Having just rebooted my laptop, I clicked on the link to open VMWare Infrastructure Web Access in the my browser and was slightly puzzled by the “page cannot be displayed” error. I figured it was probably the VMWare Server Web Access service not starting for some reason, so I opened services.msc and checked it out. The Web Access service was actually running, but the Host Agent service was not, so I tried to start it - it failed. Dutifully opening Event Viewer for some more information I found the error:

The VMware Host Agent service terminated with service-specific error 4294967295 (0xFFFFFFFF).

Great. Thanks for the elaboration. Time to check the VMWare logs, (c:\ProgramData\VMWare\VMWare Server) - the most recent of which contained the following entry:

_[2009-02-18 10:55:27.908 ‘App’ 4408 info] Trying hostsvc

[2009-02-18 10:55:27.948 ‘App’ 4408 panic] error: not well-formed (invalid token)

[2009-02-18 10:55:27.948 ‘App’ 4408 panic] backtrace:(backtraces not supported)

[2009-02-18 10:55:27.948 ‘App’ 4408 info] Win32 service stopped_

A bit of Googling pointed me in the right direction, “not well-formed” refers to the XML config files which are stored in c:\ProgramData\VMWare\VMWare Server\hostd, after that it was just a case of opening each one in turn until I found the malformed one. I backed it up and replaced it with a default version, and lo and behold, my services started!

VMWare Server: The VMware Host Agent service terminated with service-specific error 4294967295 (0xFFFFFFFF).

Share this post