Fusion 11 incorrectly reporting insufficient memory

[Kabeyun]

VMWare is holding my four VMs hostage. After upgrading macOS (host) to Big Sur (current: 11.4) none of my suspended Fusion 11 virtual machines will resume. In each case I get the alert window "Not enough physical memory is available to power on this virtual machine with its configured settings." This alert persists after shutting down all other applications, and after rebooting the host machine, both of which the alert recommends. Regardless, it's both untrue and impossible. I have a Mac mini with 32GB RAM, and each VMs is configured with 2GB, with a reported 30720 MB of memory available. Either Fusion is incorrectly determining available memory or the host OS is.

Either way, my only apparent solutions are either to pay $50 for a single support incident or $80 to upgrade to Fusion 12 in the hope that it fixes with problem. Both feel like extortion. I can't find help anywhere on VMWare's site because 98% of it is corporate IT gobbledygook instead of anything helpful and consumer-facing. I can't even migrate my VMs to Parallels Desktop, because Parallels requires the VMs to be... you guessed it... properly shut down with VMWare Tools uninstalled, which I can't do without first resuming them.

Can anyone with both a heart and a brain help me solve this problem?

Thank you!

[dempson]

VMware Fusion 11 is not compatible with macOS Big Sur, due to significant changes in Big Sur. There is no possibility of getting it to work, so do not waste money on a support incident. This happens to be one of the occasions where there is a hard compatibility break which requires a paid upgrade to a new version of Fusion, rather than the occasional free 0.5 updates (twice I can recall) or partial compatibility between an older Fusion and slightly newer macOS host.

Upgrading to Fusion 12 should solve the problem, and you can test it first using a free trial. 

Some caveats to be aware of:

1. Starting with Big Sur, VMware have switched to using Apple's hypervisor rather than VMware's own one (due to Apple deprecating kernel extensions). For some people this has resulted in issues with nested virtualisation (on many but not all Mac models) and with some network configurations.

2. You should be OK as you upgraded the OS on an existing Mac, but for future reference, Fusion 12 requires an Intel Mac. You can't yet run Fusion on an Apple Silicon Mac (M1 and future chips). VMware have promised a future version of Fusion will run on Apple Silicon, with a technology preview due this year, but it will not run any Intel-based guest OS, only ARM-based (and initially only Linux; Windows support depends on Microsoft relaxing their licence agreement; future possibility of macOS guests is unknown but probably depends on Apple being willing to do the work to make it possible).

If your use of Fusion is not commercial, and you don't need Fusion Pro, it is possible to get a free licence for Fusion 12 Player (but the web site doesn't make it easy).

All of the above has been discussed in many other threads on this forum.

[Technogeezer]

Fusion 11 is not supported to run on Big Sur, so trying to open a support incident for Fusion 11 on Big Sur will get you nowhere.  Big Sur requires Fusion 12.

How about trying the 30 day trial version of Fusion 12?  Or if you aren’t using Fusion for work, try Fusion 12 Player (it has a free personal use license). Either would allow you to check out whether Fusion 12 would work for you without having to incur an upgrade cost.  Then if you need Fusion 12 Pro you can purchase the upgrade.