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dankapp
Contributor
Contributor

Fusion 10 freezing up

Good morning. I have recently upgraded to Fusion 10 and have had many days where the Windows 10 VM just freezes up. I have to force quit Fusion to get it to respond. I am running Sierra and have not upgraded to High Sierra yet.

I did not have this issue when on version 8. Am I the only one having this issue?

Thank you in advance.

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26 Replies
Beau22
Contributor
Contributor

dankapp
You are not the only one. I'm getting this regularly after upgrading to VMWare Fusion 10.0.1
I hoped updating my OS from Sierra to High Sierra would help... but it has not.

It's a huge productivity killer.

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dankapp
Contributor
Contributor

Good morning. Beau, if you happen to find a solution to this issue please let me know. It is very frustrating to have to restart at least once throughout the day, sometimes multiple times. Like you stated, it is a huge productivity killer. I guess I can reinstall version 8 and skip 10?

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ColoradoMarmot
Champion
Champion

what host and guest configuration?  Make sure no more than N-1 physical cores allocated to any 1 VM.

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dankapp
Contributor
Contributor

I am running the latest version of Sierra (not high Sierra) and Windows 10 version 1703. The iMac has 32G installed and I have 16Gb allocated to the host and the virtual machine. Like I stated previously, everything was running just fine on version 8, it has just been since I upgraded to version 10 that the issue started.

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dankapp
Contributor
Contributor

How would I go about reverting back to version 8? Is it as simple as downloading it and running the install? I am done with version 10, I am loosing to much productivity by having to restart once or twice a day.

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dankapp
Contributor
Contributor

So I tried to revert back to version 8 and it downloaded and seemed to be fine. When I started the VM it stated that it had been created with a newer version of Fusion and I needed to upgrade my current version in order to use this VM. What a bunch of crap. The VM was created when I was on version 8 and now I am held hostage to upgrade to version 10. So I bit the bullet and paid the $50 to upgrade to version 10 in hopes that maybe it would work since I was only running the trial previously. Well that is not the case. I have lost a half a days work in visual studio because when I came in this morning my VM was locked up and I had to restart. Thanks VMware, next time I am going back to Parallels.

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ColoradoMarmot
Champion
Champion

How many physical cores in the host and how many vCPU's are assigned to the guest?

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dankapp
Contributor
Contributor

The host has 4 cores, in which 2 are assigned to the Vm. These are the same settings I have had for quite some time and didn't have this issue with version 8.

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wila
Immortal
Immortal

Hi,

PMJI... I'm not from vmware, but an observation and a recommendation for next time.

When you said:

and now I am held hostage to upgrade to version 10.

When you run a new version of VMware Fusion, one of the first things it does on your behalf is update the virtual hardware of the VM.

It does this, so that you can use the latest features from your new Fusion product.

You can downgrade that virtual hardware and go back to the previous version.

With the Virtual Machine shut down.

This is under Virtual machine menu -> Settings -> Compatibility

Select the virtual Hardware version to use for this VM.

It will then display with which VMware Fusion (and other products) it is compatible with.

--

Wil

| 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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BobTheDog
Contributor
Contributor

Getting this a couple of times a day as well, total hang. Sometimes takes the Mac with it as well.

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ColoradoMarmot
Champion
Champion

The host starving issue can be intermittent.  As long as those are physical (not virtual) cores, you should be fine with those settings.

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QuestorZ
Contributor
Contributor

Same here. On 8.x I never had any of my Windows 10 VM's to freeze. After I upgraded to VMWare Fusion Pro 10 and updated the VM Tools Windows 10 seems to perform pretty much identically as it did on Vmware Pro 8 however it freezes randomly. I leave Windows 10 version 1703 running 24x7 on my High Sierra iMac with 32GB of memory and 4GHz Intel Core i7. The VM is setup like it has been from day one with 2GB of RAM and 2 processor cores (I do nothing heavy except run a couple of light management consoles). Some have mentioned heavy specs and allocation of to much memory/processor for the Windows 10 VM as a possible issue. This absolutely shouldn't matter if the allocation is available and good headroom. Mine has very conservative specs and is still freezing. Mine usually freezes while on the Windows 10 screensaver but not always. When it freezes usually nothing is running except the OS and I'm not actively using it.

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joemarcus
Contributor
Contributor

The problem isn't just with Windows.  I have an Ubuntu 16.04.03 VM that I was using fine for over a year on Fusion Pro 8.x (last running 8.5.9).  I upgraded to 10.10 Pro yesterday, and now it has frozen twice, both times when I was not using it at the rather vanilla screensaver.  The Late-2016 MacBook Pro runs 10.13.2.

What's interesting is my FreeBSD 10.4 VM on my Mac Mini (also running 10.13.2) has not frozen once since I upgraded to 10.10 Pro yesterday.  One notable difference (other than hardware) is that I rebooted the Mac Mini after upgrading Fusion.  I'm going to try and reboot the MBP today to see if it helps.  But I gather others have tried rebooting the host without luck.

Note: both guests are using open-vm-tools rather than the official VMware version.  This never caused any issues on 8.5.

I would love to get a comment from VMware on this.  Seems like a pretty serious issue.

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joemarcus
Contributor
Contributor

Sorry to reply to myself, but I just learned something.  While the GUI has locked up, the VM is still running fine.  I am able to ping its NAT'd IP and SSH to it.  I'd be curious to know if people reporting issues with Windows are able to still ping and/or RDP to the VM from the Mac host.

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QuestorZ
Contributor
Contributor

Fusion 10.1.1 was just released. I updated to 10.1.0 Dec 21st update and that seemed to fix the issues I was experiencing. It mentioned something about the creators update 1709.

VMware Fusion 10.1.0 Release Notes

I left it running for a few days and did not freeze when running idle minimized like it was doing multiple times a day. For some reason I had to uninstall/install fresh the VMTools on that version instead of the auto-update after Fusion was updated. Let me know if this fixes yours.

They also released 10.1.1 today, Jan 9th 2018.

VMware Fusion 10.1.1 Release Notes

--Mike

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joemarcus
Contributor
Contributor

Unfortunately, the 10.1.1 update did not fix my Ubuntu hang.  The problem is the same.  After some amount of time, the GUI of the VM completely locks up.  The VM is still running and fully responsive from an SSH standpoint.  But I use the GUI a lot, so this essentially makes Fusion 10 useless for me.

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provos
Contributor
Contributor

Same problem here as well with no apparent way to fix it. (High Sierra, Fusion 10.1.1)

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joemarcus
Contributor
Contributor

Given what I was seeing, I tried powering off my VM and disabled 3D graphics acceleration.  It worked to remove the hang.  However, this is no solution.  I have a case open with VMware trying to get a definitive answer.  But since I told them this workaround was effective, they've gone silent.

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joemarcus
Contributor
Contributor

Something that was brought up to me was how much shared video memory was my VM using.  Since I had disabled 3D, I didn't know.  So I shut it down, re-enabled 3D accel, and it selected 768 MB as the default (which it said was recommended).  I then checked a Windows 7 VM I have, and it was set for 256 MB (which I'm sure was an old default).  When I shut that VM down, the recommended value was actually 1024 MB.

So, my take is that Fusion 10 upped the recommended amount of required video memory.  Check your values to make sure they're at least at the recommended levels.  So far, at 768 MB, my Ubuntu VM has not hung up again.

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