VMWare Fusion 7 / 3 displays not supported?

[jmmusick]

Hi!

I just recently added a third monitor to my setup, but it seems 3 screens might not be supported when using unity. Here's my setup:

- Macbook Pro Retina 13"

- 2 external displays

- Windows 8.1 Pro instance with VMWare Tools installed

I get a message saying unsupported display configuration when trying to enable unity with the 3rd screen enabled. When I unplug on, it seems to work. I've tried increasing the VRAM with no success.

Is anyone else running this kind of setup with success? I can't find any documentation saying it is or isn't actually supported.

Thanks!

[Panamamike]

Yeach....not sure what that was about. There was definitely only one quotation mark per side. So, I deleted that file, used a saved copy and started over.  No errors now.  but I still can't figure out how to get one app to use all 4 screens. All 4 are recognized by windows, but when I drag the window across screens, the part on the new screen disappears.  I am so frustrated.  Should have left the damn thing running on maverick and fusion 5. Everything worked fine for years until now.

[Fysicus]

Well, it's like what I said in an earlier post. I don't understand why VMWare fusion seems to be so incomplete.

I'm certain you'd never have this kind of problem in VMWare Workstation...

Just out of curiousity, what kind of application would you be running over these 4 screens?

[Panamamike]

I Trade 4 currency pairs at the same time using meta trader4. One pair for each screen (2 time frames each pair) 8 charts in total.

[Panamamike]

I am going to setup a free trial later today to test parallels. I have never used it, but I would be shocked if it is as incomplete as Fusion 7. Again, I used several versions of Fusion and all worked great Up through version 5. This "update" to fusion 7 has been nothing but a headache and needless aggravation. iit seems to me they put all the resources into the workstation Version of VMware, and fusion is treated like An afterthought. Seriously, getting several monitors to work should be plug and play automatic.  This is rediculous.

[pinjaliina]

Web forums – perhaps this one too – typically replace straight ASCII quotation marks with typographic quotation marks (Wikipedia). The difference between the two is not clearly visible with all typefaces, but if you had copied and pasted the vmx settings from this forum, this might have been the issue; if the quotation marks in the vmx file have been typographic quotation marks, VMWare has most likely interpreted them as random characters while reading the file.

[Fysicus]

How is the trial with parallels going? I'm curious.

[vbt101]

I am running OSX 10.9.5 on my host with Fusion 7.1.0. I have a 6 monitor setup (2 rows of 3) and am trying to get more than one monitor to work in the VM (preferably all of them).

My VM would not detect any more than 1 monitor in any of the following OSX guests: 10.8, 10.9, or 10.10. This was using the "Use All Displays in Full Screen" menu option. For any of these guests, I also did not have any luck after modifying the vmx file as indicated in the recommended solution for this thread (I did make sure to correct bad quotation marks).

I also tried Parallels 10 with Yosemite, and that similarly did not recognize any more than 1 monitor.

In Fusion, I am able to use all of my monitors in a Windows 7 guest (this was out of the box without any need to make VMX file changes or anything), just no luck yet with an OSX guest.

[Panamamike]

On your Mac: click the apple icon...system preferences....mission control...unflag "displays have separate Spaces".

Sent from my iPad

[vbt101]

Thanks for the suggestion, Mike. That's inline with how I have them set (both the host OSX and guest have "Displays have separate spaces" unchecked). Unfortunately this configuration does not resolve the multi-monitor issue .

Any other recommendations? Do you happen to have multi-monitors working with an OSX guest? If so, could you tell me a little about your setup?

EDIT: I also just upgraded Fusion to 7.1.1 and retried the suggested answer for this thread. Still only get one monitor.

[plasticphyte]

That is how Mac OS X Mavericks & Yosemite handle multiple monitors now - at least as long as each monitor is treated as a separate space.

I honestly think Mac OS could take a leaf out of Windows playbook here, and let apps sit across monitors.

[Fysicus]

I'm confused, are you running OSX as a host for vmware, or are you running it as a guest?

[vbt101]

Both. I have a Mavericks host, and I am trying to run any version of OSX within a VM on that host while retaining multiple monitors. OSX 10.8, 10.9, and 10.10 guests failed to give me more than 1 monitor.

It seems to me this is a Fusion problem, not an OSX config problem.

• Multiple monitors works fine in a Win 7 guest on the same host machine (rules out host machine Spaces configs)
• I would expect that if Fusion was exposing all of my monitors to the OSX guest, that the OSX guest would at least have some indication via Display/System prefs that more than one monitor is hooked up to it. The guest seems to think it only has 1 monitor.
• When I switch from single window mode to full screen (ie, "Use All Monitors") mode in Fusion, the Fusion logs seem to indicate it is still only configuring 1 monitor, where I would expect to see 6:

2015-02-17T18:43:36.762-05:00| vcpu-2| I120: Guest: svga: SetMode: mode w,h=1920, 1200 bpp=32

2015-02-17T18:43:36.764-05:00| vcpu-2| I120: Guest: svga: SetMode: pitch=7680

2015-02-17T18:43:36.764-05:00| vcpu-2| I120: Guest: fb: setDisplayMode: Display ID=1, Depth ID=0

2015-02-17T18:43:36.764-05:00| vcpu-2| I120: Guest: fb: setDisplayMode: wxh=1920x1200, bpp=32, pitch=7680

2015-02-17T18:43:36.765-05:00| vcpu-2| I120: Guest: fb: setDisplayMode: (1) wxh=1920x1200, 32 7680

[vbt101]

Does anyone know what the correct method is for filing a bug for this issue? Alternatively, is there anything else I can do to diagnose why multiple monitors are not working in Fusion?

Grepping through the vmware.log, I saw this, which is odd. Fusion seems to recognize that there are many displays, but then only exposes 1 of them to the guest (per my post above this one).

vmware.log:2015-02-17T18:23:19.502-05:00| mks| I120: Current display topology: 6 displays, bounding size (5760 x 2400), scale 1.

vmware.log:2015-02-17T18:23:19.517-05:00| vmx| I120: SVGA: Maximum display topology 9600x3200.

[vbt101]

Bump.

[thearmlesswonde]

P2P Systems -
Thank you soooooooooooo Freaking much !! haha. This worked and saved the day. Before I did this, all 3 displays were cloned.  Driving me crazy.

Should I mess with the values at all to my machine ? I have a Macpro desktop. has a 2nd video card.

Thanks again ! if your in Norfolk va, I'll buy you a beer !

"

I am using three monitors with Window 7 and Fusion 7 from my rMBP.  Two are Display Port, one is HDMI.

Did some searching around here and found a post that detailed the problem with Fusion 6.

From that post, mudaltsov wrote this:

We're gonna work on resolving this problem in Fusion, in the meantime here is a workaround. Shut down the VM and quit Fusion, then add the following lines to the .vmx file:

svga.autodetect = "FALSE"

svga.numDisplays = "3"

svga.vramSize = "134217728"

svga.maxWidth = "8192"

svga.maxHeight = "4096"

This will turn off the automatic detection of the display limits, and allow the VM to use up to 3 displays. You can change it to 4 if you think you might connect a 4th display (using both Thunderbolt ports and HDMI). The absolute maximum number of supported displays is currently 8.

I followed the above steps and it works fine in Fusion 7 too. "

[kastork]

This doesn't seem to be necessary anymore under Fusion 7.1.1  -- at least, on my 3-monitor system the Unity choice is available in the menu, and applications seem to basically work.

However it doesn't matter, because applications can't present dialog boxes.  Even the Windows 8 dialog that asks if you are sure that you want to let a program run or install can't show up.

I discovered this when I recently switched to unity mode for the first time after it started to be available again.  Skype kept starting up and I wanted to quit it.  But I couldn't, because the "are you sure..." dialog was never shown to me (though skype was waiting for me to click it.)  I killed it with the task manager, but the point is, any program that wants to show you a modal is going to appear to be hanging because it is waiting for you to click a button you can't see.

I wonder if it is on the roadmap to make Unity view usable.

[xeroid966]

This worked for VMWare Fusion 8.5.3 with Windows 10 VM on Mac OS X 10.12.3. Thanks for the answer!