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JuanGuapo
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Does anyone know if 8.5 fixes the wake-from-sleep issue?

I just received an e-mail from VMware tech support, telling me that 8.5 is coming... no word on whether or not it in fact fixes the issue that stopped me from using it (black screen when wake-from-sleep even with VMware quit/not running).

Any news if this fixes it?

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dariusd
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Hi JuanGuapo,

The short answer:  There is no change in Fusion 8.5 which is known to address the OS X sleep/wake issues which seem to correlate with the use of VMware Fusion.  That said, we still do not understand the root cause of the problem and still cannot reproduce the failure here, so it is not impossible (though I'd consider it unlikely) that we have somehow fixed it without realizing.

The longer answer is a story of a futile battle to troubleshoot a rare and complicated problem.  Please don't assume that we have been ignoring it... Our support stats show that a small but noteworthy proportion of our install base is affected, so we're very aware that there is a real problem here.  I can safely say that I've personally expended more effort on this one issue than on any other single problem I've ever worked on at VMware, and I'm just one of the team who've spent time on it.  We have an extraordinary team of engineers, but we're all pretty well stumped.  It doesn't help that the problem seems to be almost impossible to reproduce or to correlate with any specific configurations or actions, and that we really don't get any useful information out of OS X when it happens.  We had one Mac here at VMware which encountered a sleep/wake failure or blank screen on wake occasionally, right up until we started investigating it, at which point the problem went away – completely and permanently – despite our very best efforts to avoid making any change that could conceivably alter the problem's reproduction.  That was probably our best chance to make progress on understanding it...

I could continue telling the story of all the things that we've tried that have failed to lead us towards any sort of solution... but the sad conclusion is that we still have no idea what's going on, and no idea how (or if) it can be fixed.  We can't confidently say if it is a problem with VMware Fusion itself, or a problem in OS X that Fusion is somehow provoking, or even a problem with the hardware (or Mac firmware) itself, or something else entirely...

If you do happen to try Fusion 8.5, please feel free to let us know how it goes... but if you were previously affected by sleep/wake issues, I would not really expect an improved outcome.

Thanks,

--

Darius

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EMR
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I used to have a Mac Pro 1,1 and it had the problem you are mentioning whenever I ran versions of OS X later than Lion (using a custom-made 32-bit boot loader). But VMware Fusion was not to blame. Now I have a Mac Pro 5,1 and no longer have wakeup issues with exactly the same VMware Fusion.

dariusd
VMware Employee
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Hi JuanGuapo,

The short answer:  There is no change in Fusion 8.5 which is known to address the OS X sleep/wake issues which seem to correlate with the use of VMware Fusion.  That said, we still do not understand the root cause of the problem and still cannot reproduce the failure here, so it is not impossible (though I'd consider it unlikely) that we have somehow fixed it without realizing.

The longer answer is a story of a futile battle to troubleshoot a rare and complicated problem.  Please don't assume that we have been ignoring it... Our support stats show that a small but noteworthy proportion of our install base is affected, so we're very aware that there is a real problem here.  I can safely say that I've personally expended more effort on this one issue than on any other single problem I've ever worked on at VMware, and I'm just one of the team who've spent time on it.  We have an extraordinary team of engineers, but we're all pretty well stumped.  It doesn't help that the problem seems to be almost impossible to reproduce or to correlate with any specific configurations or actions, and that we really don't get any useful information out of OS X when it happens.  We had one Mac here at VMware which encountered a sleep/wake failure or blank screen on wake occasionally, right up until we started investigating it, at which point the problem went away – completely and permanently – despite our very best efforts to avoid making any change that could conceivably alter the problem's reproduction.  That was probably our best chance to make progress on understanding it...

I could continue telling the story of all the things that we've tried that have failed to lead us towards any sort of solution... but the sad conclusion is that we still have no idea what's going on, and no idea how (or if) it can be fixed.  We can't confidently say if it is a problem with VMware Fusion itself, or a problem in OS X that Fusion is somehow provoking, or even a problem with the hardware (or Mac firmware) itself, or something else entirely...

If you do happen to try Fusion 8.5, please feel free to let us know how it goes... but if you were previously affected by sleep/wake issues, I would not really expect an improved outcome.

Thanks,

--

Darius

JuanGuapo
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Thank you, dariusd for your candid response--very insightful and informative!

I am running a current-gen 15" MacBook Pro (specs below). The problem began almost immediately after starting VMware Fusion 8 Pro. I always shut down or suspended the VM and quit VMware entirely before putting the Mac to sleep--without fail, approximately 50% of the time, the Mac would wake from sleep to a black screen. Frozen. I couldn't get it to wake without doing a hard restart. :smileyconfused:

IMG_0020.jpg

A small list of things I tried...

  • Reinstalled OS X ElCap (full erase/wipe, and install)
    • Completely removing and reinstalling Fusion Pro 8.
    • Turning off Sharing, Accelerated Graphics, etc.
    • Took the MacBook Pro to the Apple Genius bar for diagnostics. I left the Mac with Apple for a few hours, they gave it a clean bill of health, suggested it was software related and to reinstall OS X.
  • Reinstalled OS X El Cap (2nd time; full erase/wipe, and install).
    • Ran for a week without VMware, no issues
    • Installed Fusion 8, the problem came back right away.
    • Uninstalled VMware Fusion completely.
    • Rebooted the machine, no issues with wake since not running Fusion 8.

I sent a data capture to your tech support people via the VMware FTP site but your tech support personnel either never received it, or it was deleted. Tech support wasn't much of any help on this, either. After a few e-mails back-and-forth, I gave up and just stopped using the software, and told them to stop calling me at all hours of the day while I'm at work.

So, as of today, I haven't run Fusion 8 Pro in well over three months now, and not a single issue with wake/sleep. Pity. I paid good money for this software but cannot use it without causing havoc with my system. I've since recommended to my friends and colleagues on Mac to avoid Fusion altogether until VMware fixes this problem.

If you or anyone else at VMware are interested, the ticket # for my final request was: 16135199606.

15" MacBook Pro mid-2015

16GB RAM / 1TB SSD

El Capitan 10.11.6

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JuanGuapo
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The locus of the original post was a simple, innocuous technical question about a piece of software. I received a detailed answer, and was later insulted for it. --My mistake for asking, clearly.

Therefore, you will understand why I find your remarks in the above post cavalier, borderline patronizing.

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wila
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Hi Juan

I really do understand your initial reply, but we do not want this type of bickering and are intent on keeping the discussion on topic.

The reason of my reply was to try and prevent this thread from escalating, so that it does not loose its value.

If you insist on playing it personal then me or one of the other moderators will end up locking this thread.

When that happens nobody wins, we all loose as I much rather keep the discussion open and about sleep/wake failure issues.

Thank you for understanding.

--

Wil

edit: improved my wording a bit and moved the earlier off topic part on this thread that you are referring to to the moderator holding area.

| Author of Vimalin. The virtual machine Backup app for VMware Fusion, VMware Workstation and Player |
| More info at vimalin.com | Twitter @wilva
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robbedoes
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FWIW I can almost reproduce it daily: In my case I have vmware fusion running windows 8 64 bit. Placing a heavy load in osx (e.g. running john as a unix app with 8 threads) during the night, gives me molasses 8 64 bit in the morning. I spent an hour waiting for the OS to loose it's sluggishnesh, only solution found was restoring a snapshot (shutting down took ages). Pauzing is possible within a minute, resuming then also takes ages.

My gut feeling is that is a vmware/windows window manager issue (3 display setup here).

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ChipMcK
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FWIW I can almost reproduce it daily: In my case I have vmware fusion running windows 8 64 bit. Placing a heavy load in osx (e.g. running john as a unix app with 8 threads) during the night, gives me molasses 8 64 bit in the morning.

The guest, due to lack of keyboard activity, attempts to sleep.

The host, due to lack of keyboard activity, attempts to sleep.

Results: cant get either to respond when you finally arrive back at the scene, behind the keyboard

This has been around since V2 or V3. Same fix behind the keyboard. Do tell the guest not to sleep. The host can handle this adequately.

Note: same thing happens with Virtualbox.

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rossco_au
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robbedoes‌‌... Just in case this might help...

I had massive problems with Windows 10 running sluggishly after a while and making the host busy seemed to trigger the problem.  I spent ages trying different things - at first it seemed to be related to multiple displays (I was running three displays as well).  Saw similar issues with saving the VM being like molasses and restoring a snapshot also seemed to help too.

After much trial and error and after involving VMWare support (who couldn't work it out - no complaints though - they did try) - I worked out the Mac was prematurely going into heat reduction mode.  When the Mac thinks it's getting too hot it starts chewing CPU cycles with idle code to reduce the CPU load and thus reduce heat.  This seems to really upset Fusion.  If I left the Mac for a while it would eventually it would come good.  In my case I worked out after monitoring CPU temps that the Mac was going into this mode prematurely.  Solution was to do an SMC reset.  Since then I've had no issues.  I also make sure I avoid clamshell mode when the Mac is busy - this really affects the cooling.  Three displays probably contributed as the Mac was switching to the GPU to drive them and this contributed to heat.

Not sure if it this helps - but it smells similar to your problem.  There's not much effort in doing a SMC reset so may be worth a try.

Cheers


rossco

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ZacB
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Guest OS is set to never sleep. I have the wake from sleep problem in both VMWare Fusion and Parallels.

Dariusd's answer is the first honest answer I've seen from either company. Support staff at both companies just gave me a long runaround. I'm currently using Parallels because they offered me free software upgrades until they fix it.

edit: I've had this problem on two different computers: a mid-2009 13" MBP and a late 2013 13" rMBP. It's persisted through complete reformats. I immediately had the same issue again with the new laptop. I've used the machines with and without FileVault (one support person at Parallels thought that might be causing it). I've tried various suspend settings with the VMs. When speaking with support, it's almost impossible to get either company to even acknowledge that the problem exists.

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JuanGuapo
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Update.

I decided to take the plunge and try Fusion 8.5.3 under macOS 10.12.2 (now 10.12.3) about two weeks ago, and so far I've had no issues running Windows 10. The Sleep/Wake issue has not surfaced. I'm unable to say what changed except updates (both Fusion and macOS) but I'm treading lightly.I'm happy to use Boot Camp but it's not nearly as convenient as running Windows as a a client OS.

I don't know how much use this is to anyone but here are the specs as they are today.

Windows 10 (release; not beta)

Screen Shot 2017-01-31 at 12.13.07 PM.png

Screen Shot 2017-01-31 at 12.15.41 PM.png

Screen Shot 2017-01-31 at 12.14.19 PM.png

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