How to Crash a MacBookPro

[simplicity]

Overview:

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Suspended a Win Server 2008 64-bit VM with 2 GB of RAM and resume a Win Server 2003 32-bit VM with 2 GB RAM - Fusion will crash Leopard. Not a kernel fault, but a complete system hang.

System Specs

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MacBook Pro 2.8 Ghz Core 2 Duo with 4 GB Ram

Leopard 10.5.6

VMware Fusion 2.0.1 (128865)

Guest 1

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Windows Server 2008 64-Bit VM with 2 GB of RAM - Suspend worked

Guest 2

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Windows Server 2003 32-Bit VM with 2 GB of RAM - Resume failed - caused machine to hang

I was able to resume the guest after a cold reboot. I don't receive a crash if I shut down Fusion between suspend/resume. Normally I would chalk it up to one of those things, but this has happened twice in two days. Both times I was resuming a VM. Really, I don't want to risk my data integrity with working to find the exact repro. It seems as though when suspending a VM, the memory is not released until Fusion is shut down?

Thanks!

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Update #1 - I spoke too soon, I am NOT able to restore the first VM. Two possibilities - the hard crash corrupted the vmem file, or perhaps the first VM was not finished suspending when the 2nd was resumed. The UI did report though that it was "suspended." Is it possible that the UI would be wrong and the background process was still trying to suspend the VM?

[simplicity]

Here is a picture taken of the monitor during a restore when it's frozen. You can see some TOP info.

The system logs just have a big white space in them.

[admin]

Is the virtual machine stored on a FileVault protected home folder, an external drive, or any other unusual place?

[simplicity]

No, it's in a subfolder called Virtual Machines off the root: Macintosh HD\Virtual Machines.

The whole hard disk is protected with PGP Whole Disk Encryption though.

[Obeechi]

PGP Encryption. Gee that's something I've sometimes wondered about. I don't use FileVault. If you have a good knowledge of PGP for the Mac, and all its pro's and con's and ins and outs, I'd be really interested in reading a Document posting...

[admin]

The whole hard disk is protected with PGP Whole Disk Encryption though.

That's interesting, and not something we test. I'll ping the appropriate people to see if we can reproduce this.

[simplicity]

So the product is pretty good. There is a pre-boot screen that comes up after the boot sound but before the OS boots. You can enter your password there. Speed seems to be excellent, I haven't "noticed" a slowdown using it, but I haven't benchmarked it either. What I don't like is that it really does do the whole disk and not just a partition. So no boot camp (at least not on the same disk.) It also means I cannot move my VMs to an unencrypted drive. But it's more reliable than FileVault.

On the upside, the swap and all my data is encrypted. I do a lot of traveling so I feel better about lugging my data around. I do know about the "cold boot attacks" against Whole Disk Encryption, but something is better than nothing...