Fusion on Leopard issues

[nmeth]

Just to summarise my experiences of Fusion on Leopard:-

1. Fusion and Time Machine do not play well. I managed to hang both Fusion and Time Machine, requiring a forced reboot to get either back. Suggest that at the very least the standard documentation strongly suggests that the "Virtual Machines" folder be added to Time Machine's exclusion list, better would be for Fusion to tell Time Machine to keep off (I understand there is an API to add exclusions for this sort of purpose). For extra brownie points, a description of good backup practice for VMs would be good.

2. I seem to have some issues with the fn-ctrl-alt-backspace key sequence to emulated ctrl-alt-delete. Of course I can't reporduce it now... however when the VM screen saver has kicked in I have found I have needed the VM menu entry to get a password prompt back. This is working in Unity mode with a Win2003 VM.

Otherwise things seem pretty good at present.

What I would like in terms of improvements is a change to the start-up. I'd like Fusion to at least have the option of starting up without putting up a list of your VMs - either starting a (preferences selected) VM, or just sitting in the Dock waiting for something to happen. Adding a list of inactive VMs to the Dock icon menu would be even better (in a way similar to Yummy FTP's startup/Dock behaviour).

I'm currently running Version 1.1rc1 (61385) on Leopard (10.5) with the keychain bug fixes, on a MacBook.

Nigel.

[joeaguy]

I've been having issues with Leopard + VMware 1.1 also.

I set up a CentOS 4 virtual machine on an external drive I also happen to use for Time Machine. At some random point (I think when time machine starts a backup), vmware freezes. If I force quit it, it does not dissapear from the doc. On further inspection, a zombie process called vmware with parent launchd exists in the process table. Since vmware becomes a zombie, I guess the dock does not remove it.

I've not had any problems yet with virtual machines on my internal drive.

It seems time machine and/or vmware access the disk in some way that doesn't play nicely together.

[admin]

Are you using the final version of 1.1? It should have fixed the known Time Machine issue, if you're still seeing bad stuff, we may have more investigating to do.

[joeaguy]

Version 1.1 (62573)

I'm on 10.5 with all of the updates as of today, on revision 1 (core duo) intel iMac with 2gb ram.

For my last crash, I did send the automatic report to Apple.

[sisaac]

I'm having the same problem on a Mac Pro (quad 2.66 GHz).

[jared_oberhaus]

This sounds very much like the problem that's being discussed on these two threads:

Fusion 1.1RC1 "beachballs" under heavy VM load (after switch to leopard)

http://communities.vmware.com/message/820392

Hangs & Disk Corruption using Ubuntu 7.10 w/Fusion 1.1 + 10.5.1

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/115466

Filed support request #199767001