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Rzn8tor
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Fusion cancels shutdown

I shut down my system at night, and if I don't remember to first exit any VM's Fusion will cancel the shutdown. Is there any way to make Fusion shut down automatically? I have unchecked confirm before closing in preferences.

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bgertzfield
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Unfortunately, this is a bug Fusion has had for some time. I really apologize for the inconvenience; we'll try to address it in a future release.

View solution in original post

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bgertzfield
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Unfortunately, this is a bug Fusion has had for some time. I really apologize for the inconvenience; we'll try to address it in a future release.

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Rzn8tor
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Thanks, I think I can live with it until then...

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jerrydaniel
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Is there a fix for this issue yet? I've got a lab of 35 Imacs running 10.6 and the latest fusion.

The mac side can not install mac updates and then restat because vmware fusion cancels the restart.

I need a way for the machines to shutdown vmware fusion so the updates can restart the imacs.

Any help you can offer would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Jerome

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Entegy
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Is it really a bug? The cancellation sounds fine to me, because it reminds you to actually shut down your virtual machines properly as opposed to just killing them, which can damage the data within. And it make sense that the vm shutdown wouldn't be automatic as the guest operating systems might have their own shutdown hangs and cancellation due to apps within them. So just shutdown or suspend your virtual machines before restarting/shutting down your Mac.

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jerrydaniel
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Well in a lab situation where you have the vm starting automatically and one wantes the security updates to install at night then you would want vmware to be able to shut down automatically. If not then patches can not happen at night.

I agree that if it is my personal desktop it's not such an issue but in a computer lab where things are automated it is an issue.

The point is that vmware cancels the shutdown. It does not say to the guest OS hey wait a second for me to shut down then you can reboot. I just cancels the reboot so the patches are never applied.

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Entegy
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It's most likely Fusion cannot determine what's going on in the shutdown procedure of the guest. Like I said before, the guest could be having issues with a process during its own shutdown procedure. I know Fusion will not cancel the shut down procedure of the host as long as all vms are shut down.

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ColoradoMarmot
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There's also a timing issue - it may take longer to shut down the guests and gracefully exit fusion than the reboot timeout in OSX. You might be able to change the settings to 'suspend guests on Fusion shutdown', rather than shutdown.

Given the recent buggy updates, I wouldn't want to have 35 machines auto-updating anyway Smiley Happy

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admin
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Seems to work for me, though maybe OS X updates differ somehow from a user-initiated powerdown. Here's what I did:

Fusion 3.1.0 (261058), Ubuntu guest with Tools, Fusion's "Confirm before closing" setting off. I tried with Fusion set to both suspend and poweroff when closing. I was able to both restart or shut down the Mac (Apple menu > Restart... or Shut Down...), and Fusion behaved as expected (the virtual machine did what it was supposed to, then the Mac did what it was supposed to). Is this not the case for you?

Coming at the problem from a different angle, since you're automating things anyway, you could script Fusion to suspend or shut down guests before installing patches -- take a look at /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/vmrun.

Entegy and dlhotka are correct in saying that a guest shut down (or even suspend, since we still have to write memory out to disk) can take a while. If you script the guest shutdown/suspend, you avoid possible timeout problems.

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jerrydaniel
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Thanks Etung. I used the vmrun command to suspend the virtual machine.

The vmrun manual is here .

It worked like a charm.

There is a pretty good piece of software called lingon for mac that helps automate this type of action.

I do have comfirm before closing unchecked and it makes no difference on the latest snow leopard running in simple finder.

Jerry

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bkorb
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Here we are, *FIVE* years later and the same damn problem, only worse.  The stinking VM won't power down either.  No way out, except to shoot the bloody Fusion process.

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ColoradoMarmot
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There's a preference in Fusion 4 that causes the VM's to suspend when fusion is closed.  The issue is that takes time - particularly on a spinning disk, and the apple shutdown procedure times out.  Not a thing that Fusion can do to change that.

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bkorb
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Even on Fusion 3, it offers to suspend the VM which, if rejected, causes the shutdown to be aborted.  The problem stems from Fusion failing to do anything at all including shutting down.  Thus, I have to kill the process and leave behind an damaged VM.  Not good.

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ColoradoMarmot
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Well, yeah, if you refuse, it will do that because it has to keep running.

But what do you mean about killing the process?  The VM just keeps running, and you can shut it down normally.

If you can't then you have a corrupt VM - try building a new one.

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bkorb
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Please pay attention.  This is a Fusion bug.  Fusion refused to quiesce the VM and shut down and also, because it was running, refused to allow me to shut down until I used "Force Quit" to shoot fusion down.  *Because* I shot the fusion process, it left the VM in an inconsistent state.  This is a five (or more) year old fusion bug.

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dariusd
VMware Employee
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Hi bkorb,

If I am understanding correctly, the symptoms you describe are different from – and more serious than – the issue originally discussed in this thread.  If you needed to use Force Quit to terminate VMware Fusion, it's a new issue.  So that we don't all end up confused, could you please start a new thread, and describe in detail the steps you are taking when you encounter the problem, what you are seeing when things start to misbehave, and what you expected to see.  Include information on your host OS, the version of Fusion you are using, the guest OS (or guest OSes) which are affected, and indicate whether or not you've installed VMware Tools in the VM.  You haven't stated clearly whether or not the VM fails to shut down on its own (even when you're not shutting down the host or quitting Fusion), so that would be another good piece of information to include in the new thread.

With the above information, we may be able to help resolve the problem for you.

Thanks,

--

Darius

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