Fusion 7 Pro sleep image corruption

[CuriosTiger]

There is a known issue with sleep image corruption when running VMware Fusion on either Mavericks or Yosemite. In my particular case, I am running VMware Fusion 7.1.0 Pro on two computers running Mavericks, and one of them (a mid-2012 MacBook Pro running OS X 10.10.1) consistently exhibits this problem.

Steps to reproduce:

1. Start a virtual machine inside VMware Fusion (in my case, Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit)

2. Put the computer to sleep while the VM is still running

3. Wait for the computer to enter "deep sleep" (formerly called hibernation

OS X will crash when you attempt to wake it, citing sleep image corruption and failure to wake from sleep. All unsaved data will be lost (less of a problem than in the past, since most apps auto-save state these days, but still serious.)

Workaround: Suspend open VMs and quit VMware Fusion prior to putting the computer to sleep.

This bug has been discussed in other threads, notably Re: Fusion 6.0.2 and OSx Mavericks 10.9.1 - Sleep Wake failure unless I shutdown or suspend my Win7P...

While that thread lists another workaround (using pmset to disable deep sleep/hibernation entirely), I've yet to see anything from VMware about a fix for this. Can we get a status update?

[ColoradoMarmot]

Step 2 is never a good idea - always sleep the guest first.  It takes a long time to dump the virtual ram, so you're likely hitting a timing problem with a partially written Fusion memory dump when the host sleeps.

[CuriosTiger]

If that's the case, how come this doesn't happen in Parallels, nor did it happen with VMware Fusion under 10.8 or older?

Is there a way to confirm your hypothesis?

I realize it's better to sleep the guest first, but on modern-day laptops, sometimes people just close the lid and go. OS X is designed for that use case, and if VMware Fusion cannot dump the VM's memory image to disk within the time allowed by the OS, I would at least hope for a semi-graceful failure (e.g. the VM has to restart but the host OS does not) and a more informative error message than a generic Sleep/Wake error and an offer to send an error report to Apple.

[WKonings]

Hi CuriosTiger,

This problem with Fusion still exist today on my iMac with MacOS Mojave,  Fusion 11 and Windows 10.

I have tried to disable hibernation but that did not make a difference.

I am running Windows 10 under Parallels on my Macbook and, as you say, do not have this problem.

It is resolved by bringing Fusion to sleep first, but you sometimes forget.  Afterwards it takes a long time for MacOS to restart and I have had cases where it took a long time for Windows to restart as it had run do disk repairs to resolve a corrupt image, probably caused by the hard reboot.

Regards,

Wouter