GNS3 with VMware Fusion Player (Personal Use License) on MacOs Catalina

[gnuser333]

Hello,

At first excuse my English, I'm not a native speaker.

The problem is that GNS3 don't work together with VMware Fusion Player (to run the GNS3-VM as server, for running the appliances, which are Dynamips and Quemu-VM's, in it). 

I just installed the recent versions of GNS3 and the free VMware Fusion Player (Personal Use License) on MacOs Catalina. The recent GNS3-VM(2.2.17) is installed in Fusion Player and can be started manually.

When I try to configure GNS3, with the build-in setup-wizard, to run appliances in a virtual machine (with vmware) I get the following error-message:

VMware vmrun tool could not be found, VMware or the VIX API (required for VMware player) is probably not installed. You can download it from https://www.vmware.com/support/developer/vix-api. After installation you need to restart GNS3.

When I follow the link, it doesn't show anything. Even when I'm currently logged in with my VMware account.

But could it be that the vix-api doesn't have to be installed additionally in the current version of fusion player.

Vmware-Website:

• VIX API again included with VMware Fusion.
  VMware Fusion 5 for Mac OS X included the VIX libraries, as did intervening releases and VMware Fusion 10. When preparing VIX programs for VMware Fusion, you can define VixServiceProvider as type VIX_SERVICEPROVIDER_VMWARE_WORKSTATION.

but I don't understand what that means:

you can define VixServiceProvider as type VIX_SERVICEPROVIDER_VMWARE_WORKSTATION 

and how to do that.

So I looked for another workaround and tried the following:

I set the "path to vmrum" in the vmware prefrences of GNS3 to

/Applications/VMware Fusion.app/Contents/Library/

which is the actually path to vmrun.

This gives the following error-message:

=> Error while saving settings: GNS3VM: Error while executing VMware command: vmrun /Applications/VMware Fusion.app/Contents/Library is not accessible

Maybe this is because GNS3 and VMware Fusion are installed with different owner/group permissions:

drwxr-xr-x   3 root   wheel  - 96 17 Nov 14:43  -  VMware Fusion.app

drwxr-xr-x   68 root  wheel -  2176 17 Nov 14:45  -  Library

drwxr-xr-x@  3 meier  admin  - 96  4 Dez 08:13  -  GNS3.app

I don't know.

I no longer know what to do, maybe someone could help me out. 

Thanks in advance.

[ColoradoMarmot]

It sounds like it's looking for workstation components, rather than Fusion.  Are you sure it's mac compatible?

[gnuser333]

hello,

thanks for your answer.

I'm not sure what you are asking for, to be mac compatible?

[ColoradoMarmot]

VMRun is a host function of Fusion, not inside the guest.  I'm not familiar with the particular application you're using, but it's possible that it only works with Workstation and not Fusion.  That's what I meant - are you sure it works on the Mac with Fusion, not just Windows and workstation?

[gnuser333]

thank you,

it should. The GNS3 help says:

https://docs.gns3.com/docs/getting-started/setup-wizard-gns3-vm

this is what following the link shows:

GNS3 supports both VMware Workstation Pro and VMware Fusion (Paid software), as well as VMware Player (Free software).

NOTE

VMware Player requires the installation of additional free software (VMware VIX). If you forget to install this, GNS3 will prompt you to do so (and open a browser to the link on VMware’s website). The option for “VIX version 1.17 and later” is sufficient for VMware Workstation Player version 16.x. For older versions of Player, you’ll need to select a previous version of VIX that matches your version of Player.

But currently, I understand it so, VIX is already integrated in Fusion.