VMware Communities
ccaum
Contributor
Contributor
‎12-22-2008 12:33 PM

BUG REPORT: VMWare doesn't report hardware to system profiler

If I run '/usr/sbin/system_profiler -xml' in a Mac OS X Server VM with the latest VMWare FUsion, I get this error:

error: 2008-12-22 12:45:58.425 system_profiler[7226:10b] Exception while calling

    • -: index (3) beyond bounds (2)

This is because VMWare is not reporting the hardware present on the host OS. Things like the serial number make sense, but not the CPU, model etc. should be whatever the host OS reports. This makes hardware gathering tools crash and thus prevents me from deploying Mac OS X VMs in my network. Yes, I am aware that the support for OS X Server is experimental. So is my deployment.

0 Kudos
3 Replies
admin
Immortal
Immortal
‎12-22-2008 10:57 PM

It's a known issue that System Profiler doesn't work in OS X Server guests, we're tracking this as bug 295515.

This is because VMWare is not reporting the hardware present on the host OS.

That's not the expected behavior - with the exception of the CPU, virtual hardware is independent from the underlying physical hardware (and even the CPU is a bit different). It is a problem that you don't get any information back, but it is not expected to match the physical hardware.

This makes hardware gathering tools crash and thus prevents me from deploying Mac OS X VMs in my network.

Can you explain more about your use case?

0 Kudos
ccaum
Contributor
Contributor
‎12-23-2008 06:22 AM

Sure, I was quite vague. I use a tool called puppet (http://reductivelabs.com/trac/puppet) to manage all the systems in my network. Puppet uses a tool called facter on all its clients. Facter gathers "facts" about the system such as hardware, architecture, system state and much more. Facter currently crashes when it doesn't get hardware information back. This behavior is being modified as I type, but it is expected behavior that the system, virtual or not, will have some type of hardware to report.

0 Kudos
nigelkersten
Contributor
Contributor
‎12-23-2008 09:51 AM

Just adding myself as another person affected by this issue.

We have a whole series of tools that rely upon getting some information back from system_profiler regarding SPHardwareDataType and SPMemoryDataType that we use for deployment at Google.

We're currently investigating the possibility of continuous build servers running OS X Server in order to test our OS X client installations (yes, there are differences, but when all you've got is a hammer....) and not having this information rules out the possibility of doing this.

Feel free to email me directly if you would like more impact data related to this bug.

0 Kudos