Fusion drained battery Macbook Pro when it's in sleep mode

[rayx2022]

Hi there,

I have been using Fusion for about 4 years. I recently found that it often drained my MacBook Pro's battery during night when the laptop is in sleep mode. This didn't happen in the past (at least not very often). I wonder if anyone observes similar issues and have any suggestions?

The MacBook Pro is 2017 version (Intel CPU). I run Ubuntu 20.04 in Fusion. I didn't make configuration change (installing new packages or enabling new services) in the guest OS recently.

Is shutting down the guest OS the only solution? 😞

Thanks for any suggestion.

[ColoradoMarmot]

It's always better to suspend a guest manually before sleeping/suspending the host.

But to your question, do you have 'wake for network access' and/or 'allow bluetooth devices to wake this mac' enabled in system preferences?  They both can cause unexpected wakeups.  

I had my mac in a backpack once, and the cat decided to sleep on the external keyboard.  When I got on the plane I had a burning hot mac and a dead battery 🙂

[rayx2022]

Hi, dlhotka,

My apologies that I didn't read your reply until today.

I have running Linux guest on my laptop for many years (I used to use VirtualBox on Windows and switched to Fusion on MacOS three years ago). I never think about suspending guest manually. I have the impression all the time that when the host is suspended the guest is suspended too since the part of the guest OS is implemented as user space process in host OS. I wonder if your suggestion of suspending the guest manually is from your own experience or vmware docs? I'm just curious.

And thanks for your suggestions about turning off 'wake for network access' and 'allow bluetooth devices to wake this mac'. They were on by default and I turned off them just now.

I also have a hypothesis. I have a habit of opening a lot of tabs in web browser in the guest. It could be that some web pages (e.g. medium.com, or reddit.com) contain javascript code which keep accessing the network, which somehow (?) wakes up the host frequently. It's just a hypothesis and I don't know this for sure (as mentioned above, I think the guest OS is suspended when host OS is suspended).

Also, your reply made to me to take a closer look at my battery status in macOS system report. The status is much worse than I thought. I use my Macbook pro only at home and it's plugged in most time. I use it for only two tasks: running Linux in fusion and running Xcode to develop app. I had thought its battery is still in quite good status, but turned out I already get "Important Battery Message" warning about the battery life. While I don't have proof, I'd think Fusion is very likely the culprit 😞

Thanks.

[continuum]

> I wonder if your suggestion of suspending the guest manually is from your own experience or vmware docs? I'm just curious.

There a lot of very useful tips that you will only hear from us longterm users. This is one of them: if you plan to set  your laptop / macbook to sleep mode always suspend your VMs first.
And dlhotka is one of those users - if he contradicts the manual listen to him.

Ulli

[rayx2022]

I really appreciate dlhotka's suggestions. I was just curious about the underlying technical reason.

Are there vmware engineers or product advocates in the forum? If it's good practice to suspend guest when host is suspended, I wonder why not implement this feature in Fusion?

- When host OS is suspended, Fusion suspends the guest OS.

- When host OS is resumed, Fusion resumes the guest OS.

- Provide an option to let user opt in the feature if there is some reason to not make the above behavior the default

It seems a simple but very useful feature to me, which can save many users' batteries.