headless / disconnected

[cgiard]

I've read a few posts that Fusion supports running "headless" if the GUI application crashes or is killed while the VM is running. Since the VM is actually a separate process, is it possible to start the VM w/o the GUI using the command line? If so, this could be the answer for people that want to run headless server VMs.

Also, if a VM is running headless, will it respond to a SIGTERM and gracefully shutdown the guest OS?

[admin]

If so, this could be the answer for people that want to run headless server VMs.

I don't think it'll work across user logout or as the non-current user (though I haven't tried), so in this respect it won't be a good headless server.

[admin]

It seems like it would be easy to work around. Just have a vmware user with correct permissions and run a daemon as that user that handles spinning of VM processes as that user. Make a simple interface for commanding start, pause, resume, stop, restart, etc. No different than sshd really. Actually, launchd may be able to do it without another daemon, though I've not messed with launchd enough to know.

[rcardona2k]

Headless VMs are a feature of Workstation 6, although I think the user has to stay logged in. You can run headless VMs in Fusion with fast-user switching (without logging off the user). But running headless involves killing the Console 'head' ungracefully.

I think if you log off in any case OS X kills off your processes so you'll want to change the process ownership or run Fusion as a different user such as root. IMO, running anything as root for instance would be bad.

BTW, here's a thread on how to run "headless:"

http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=538524

[bgertzfield]

I've read a few posts that Fusion supports running

"headless" if the GUI application crashes or is

killed while the VM is running. Since the VM is

actually a separate process, is it possible to start

the VM w/o the GUI using the command line? If so,

this could be the answer for people that want to run

headless server VMs.

This is unsupported, but like on our other platforms, you should be able to do the following:

1) Edit your .vmx file, and add:

msg.autoAnswer = TRUE

2) From Terminal, run:

nohup "/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/vmware-vmx" "/path/to/vm/foo.vmx"

Let us know if this works for you.

Also, if a VM is running headless, will it respond to

a SIGTERM and gracefully shutdown the guest OS?

I'm not sure if this is present currently -- if it works on Linux, it might work on Mac OS. Sounds like a decent feature to add, though.

[admin]

Also, if a VM is running headless, will it respond

to

a SIGTERM and gracefully shutdown the guest OS?

I'm not sure if this is present currently -- if it

works on Linux, it might work on Mac OS. Sounds like

a decent feature to add, though.

It would be nice if the SIGTERM does a suspend on the guest. Combined with a mechanism to start them at boot, this would make a nice set of dedicated headless machines on your local machine. On shutdown of the host all the guests would suspend, and then on boo of the host all guests would resume.

[Pat_Lee]

Since "Fusion" is a consumer focused product, these requests may not make the Fusion product. These features requests are more for hosted server products or technical developer products that we will keep in mind as we plan our future roadmap.

Thanks,

Pat Lee

Senior Product Manager - Mac Products

VMware

[cgiard]

Ben,

Thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately, vmware-vmx dies instantly from (apparently) a SIGINT. I'm guessing it is looking for some environment variables or open file handles.

[cgiard]

Pat,

Thanks for the response. Hopefully the future roadmap will include server and workstation products, as that would basically give VMware the broadest virtualization platform out there (and would also be very useful to me personally).

[bgertzfield]

Hi cgiard,

Looks like you're in luck. There are two undocumented config variables:

signal.suspendOnHUP = "TRUE"

and

signal.powerOffOnTERM = "TRUE"

that you can add to your individual .vmx files, or your ~/Library/Preferences/VMware Fusion/config file, that will let your VMs suspend on SIGHUP, and gracefully power-off on SIGTERM, respectively.

Good luck!

[cj0]

Is there possibly also some other undocumented variable that prevents VMware fusion from blocking logout and reboots?

With:

msg.autoAnswer = “TRUE“ signal.suspendOnHUP = “TRUE“ signal.powerOffOnTERM = “TRUE“

in the .vmx file, fusion still blocks logout and reboots:

"Are you sure you want to suspend the virtual machine and exit?"

"Suspending will preserve your invironment and data for later use."

Yes please, do suspend, but how to autoAnswer this message with "Suspend"?

(and prevent the os from saying: "The application VMware Fusion cancelled logout..."

[admin]

Do you have "VMware Fusion > Preferences > Confirm before closing" selected? If so I'm not sure if autoanswer is supposed to ignore that prompt or if it's a bug or if you're seeing something else, but disabling it may work around the problem.

[cj0]

Yes, "VMware Fusion > Preferences > Confirm before closing" was selected.

[cj0]

After deselecting "VMware Fusion > Preferences > Confirm before closing", the "suspend" message doesn't popup.

However OSX still popups: "The application VMware Fusion canceled logout. To try again, ...".

Sometimes VMware Fusion.app was quit, other times the app itself is even open, showing "Virtual Machine Library".