All sorts of new Ubuntu problems....

[dpev]

Hiya,

I've been running vmware fusion 7.1.3 on my MacBook Pros (17" Mid 2010 + 17" Early 2011) for yonks and it's generally been very reliable.  I upgraded to High Sierra when it first came out and things still seem to be fine running my two VMs ; one windows 10 and one Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

Now, after fatally breaking my old ubnutu VM, I thought I'd try out the recent ubuntu 17.10 release in a vm and this is where I started having problems. Doing an install from the iso the installer complains about a file being missing from the install media. On retry it finds it and carries on and then near the end the installer fatally crashes. I tried this a couple of times and the behaviour is consistent. I also checked the image md5sum and it's correct.

Next I thought I'd do a new clean install of 16.04.3 instead. This also has a similar problem but complains about a different file - then the installer dies with a fatal error.

So logically I assumed that it's a high sierra problem given that I refuse to spend money on repeatedly upgrading VMWare when I don't need to... So I downloaded and installed the VMWare 10 trial and repeated the tests. Now, these don't have the problem with mysterious corrupt files but near the end the installer fatally crashes again. This is with both 16.04 and 17.10 installs.

Now I'm really scratching my head. All I can think of is that maybe there are installer changes in Ubuntu recently common to both versions that are provoking a problem on vmware. So I go back to a original ubuntu 16.04 release image and try and install that (still on vmware 10 trial) and that fails as well (crashing out of the GUI)

All in all I'm a bit perplexed - this seems like a pretty significant problem but digging around the forums and using google I can't seem to find references to other people having similar issues... Has anyone else experienced similar? I'm now a bit stuck not being able to re-install..!

[dpev]

Even better. So it turns out that VMWare 10 trial over-wrote my VMWare 7 installation. So I fully uninstalled it to re-install v7 which has re-installed. However now if I try and start what were my working VM's (which Id carefully told vmware not to upgrade) vmware reports "internal error" and fails. Brilliant, so I cant run anything at all now...

[wila]

Hi,

I was going to say that you're the first person I've heard about that was able to get Fusion 7 running on High Sierra...

Going out of a limb here, but my guess is that your internal error is caused by apple's requirement for users to confirm kernel extensions

Basically this problem:

VMware Fusion on macOS High Sierra - System Extension Blocked - PlanetVM

If there's no "Allow" button and the workaround mentioned at the bottom of the article above  doesn't work then I also read a report somewhere here from a person who turned off the new requirement.

Not sure I agree with you on trying to run Fusion 7 on macOS HS, as Fusion 7 has been retired for a while and has a few known security vulnerabilities, but will try to help what I can.

--

Wil