VMWare Server stop and start via script

The "/etc/init.d/vmware stop" command does not work. I always get this error:

 VMControl error -8: Invalid operation for virtual machine's current state: Make sure the VMware Server Tools are running

So when I want to hard restart a server from a script I end up doing something like this:

BAD_PID=`ps -ef | grep example/Ubuntu.vmx | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}'`
kill -INT $BAD_PID
sleep 10
kill -9 $BAD_PID
vmware-cmd /var/lib/vmware/Virtual\ Machines/example/Ubuntu.vmx start
if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
    echo "Example server did not restart."
fi

VMWare itself is pretty reliable, but some of my web servers are not. I have a watchdog script similar to the one below that I run from cron. In the real world you might not want to reboot your web server just because it fails to respond to a single query.

#!/bin/sh
# This checks that example server is responding to queries.
# If it fails then it sends an email alert to a bunch of people.
DTS=`date`
wget -q --no-cookies -O - http://www.example.com/index.php?q=94105 | grep -q "San Francisco"
if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
mail 4155551212@vtext.com noah@example.com -s "ALERT! www.example.com is not responding." <<HERE_ALERT
    ${DTS}
    www.example.com did not return expected response to test query.
    Example server may be down.
    Trying to hard restart it...
HERE_ALERT
    BAD_PID=`ps -ef | grep example/Ubuntu.vmx | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}'`
    kill -INT $BAD_PID
    sleep 10
    kill -9 $BAD_PID
    vmware-cmd /var/lib/vmware/Virtual\ Machines/example/Ubuntu.vmx start
    if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
    mail 4155551212@vtext.com noah@example -s "ALERT! Example server did not restart." <<HERE_RESTART
        ${DTS}
        Example server did not restart.
        VMWare may be down.
HERE_RESTART
    fi
fi