Fusion VM unresponsive shutting down, can't power off

[mikeinseattle]

I'm using VMWare Fusion 8.5.7 and I won't be upgrading. I have an XP VM that I suspended, shut down the Mac, moved to a different network, rebooted the Mac, and un-suspended the VM. It was very slow so I shut down Windows and it has been stuck on "Closing network connections" for more than a day. Activity Monitor shows the VMWare-VMX process with varying CPU utilization so I figure it's doing something. On the "Virtual Machine" menu, pressing the option key enables "Shutting down...". When I press that it shows the "power off" dialog. Pressing "power off" doesn't do anything, I've tried 100 times.

What are  my options? Force quit VMWare from the OS? What will that do to the VM? Are there any other options?

[wila]

Hi,

The problem was that you suspended the VM and then moved it to another physical host where you resumed it.

If the host has a slightly different CPU then you basically swapped out the CPU in a running machine.

As the guest OS is expecting to have access to all kinds of registers that suddenly disappeared "weird shit (tm)" might happen.

If a power off doesn't even work, then what you can do is: suspend it again.

After that shut down Fusion.

Then go into the VM's directory and delete (or rename) the suspend file (the .vmss file)

After that open Fusion again and start the VM. It should no longer try to resume, but instead boot like the power cord has been pulled.

Normally that is fine, but any data that was not saved in your running applications will be gone.

PS: If even suspend won't work then you can only reboot your host and then do the steps with removing the suspend file.

--

Wil

[mikeinseattle]

I didn't move the VM to a different host. Same physical host, I just moved the Mac to a different location, a different network. I mentioned this because I didn't know if it is relevant or not. (Different IP address on a different subnet, slowness caused by never ending network timeouts? That seems like something legacy Windows would do.)

Windows is shutting down so I cannot suspend. All those Virtual Machine menu choices are disabled (grayed-out). When attempting to reboot Mac OS a message box appears that VMWare is busy and so the restart has been interrupted.

I guess my only solution at this point if I don't want to let it go for days is to Force Quit VMWare, reboot the Mac and delete the .vmss file?

Thanks

Mike

[wila]

Hi,

Oh sorry, I misread on the moving part. That makes your issue even more weird.

You mentioned that Power off isn't working and that you are also aware about the "power off" command in the menu to become active when holding down the option key while the Virtual Machine menu is selected. There's also a "Reset" option that should work and becomes active when you hold down the option key. You probably have tried that as well then (if it is even active) as well as things like Ctrl+Alt+Del?

The "Power Off" option should normally function like pulling the power cord.

The VM being in a different network should not trigger a problem like this. It doesn't really matter that it is XP on that detail.

The part I wonder about is if there are hardware problems (most likely suspect would be the disk) or something silly like running out of file handles, but then you would see other problems in the host OS as well.

I'm not a fan of Force quitting a VM, but IIRC then in current VMware Fusion versions, Fusion would still try to close the files. Unfortunately I'm not able to dig up the statement from an employee on that bit.

--

Wil

[mikeinseattle]

In 8.5.7 VMWare I could only see the "shutting down..." menu choice when pressing the option key. From there I could press the "power off" button which did nothing. There was no reset or any other kind of button I could see. On the toolbar or in the virtual machine library there was a pause button that did nothing. In the end I had to force quit VMWare. There was no .vmss file to delete. I rebooted the Mac and when I opened the VM again it was as if it had been powered off and it booted just fine.

Thanks.

[wila]

Hi,

Cool, glad to hear it was resolved.

It actually makes sense that there's no .vmss as you couldn't suspend.

If everything is normal then that's fine.

I am still curious though and wouldn't mind looking at the vmware.log file to see if there's a hint as to what happened as that certainly was not a normal shut down.

--

Wil