Update April 2021: I noticed VMware Workstation 16 in Ubuntu tends to install kernel modules fine through its GUI now, so a lot of this info about how to compile and install vmmon and vmnet is probably obsolete. But since it may be useful to someone using an older version of Workstation, I’ll leave it…

If you’ve ever run into this, it’s a real bummer. I encountered it after using rsync to clone a vm. At the outset, I want to say either using vm -> manage -> clone or file -> export to OVF are both easier options, but if you’ve already copied a vm by hand, you can…