As usual, I sped through the VMware Server installation, just using default settings. I then found myself unable to log in to the VMware Server Console. I would always get an error:
You do not have permissions to login to the server.
Some searching turned up a solution which is to log in as root and set a password (root has no password by default on Ubuntu). This is an ugly solution, so I re-ran VMware Server configuration. That’s when I noticed this question:
The current administrative user for VMware Server is 'root'. Would you like
to specify a different administrator? [no]
Answering yes allows you to specify the local account which will be administrator for VMware Server:
Please specify the user whom you wish to be the VMware Server administrator
[root] fitzsimjUsing fitzsimj as the VMware Server administrator.