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gringley
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

PhoneHome library?

I was trying out my Catalina disk shrink process on a Big Sur Beta VM with Fusion 12 on 10.15.7.  I got this result:

macOS Big Sur Public Beta.vmwarevm % /Applications/VMware\ Fusion.app/Contents/Library/vmware-vdiskmanager -d macOS\ Catalina\ Public\ Beta-disk1-cl1.vmdk

VixDiskLib: Failed to initialize PhoneHome library.

  Defragment: 100% done.

Defragmentation completed successfully.

macOS Big Sur Public Beta.vmwarevm % /Applications/VMware\ Fusion.app/Contents/Library/vmware-vdiskmanager -k macOS\ Catalina\ Public\ Beta-disk1-cl1.vmdk

VixDiskLib: Failed to initialize PhoneHome library.

  Shrink: 100% done.

Shrink completed successfully.

Good news is the process still works...So what's up with that PhoneHome thing?

6 Replies
wila
Immortal
Immortal

Hi,

This comes from the department of a certain developer habit: "badly naming things"

Here's a snippet from some developer documentation about the "Phone Home" feature in the Virtual Disk Development Kit

The Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP) helps VMware understand what products and

versions have been installed in a datacenter. This information is collected to assist and streamline

problem determination and resolution.

Whether this information gets sent to VMware is a customer choice (on-premise) with CEIP opt-in and

opt-out, or as part of their Terms of Service. VMware will collect only the product name and version for

improved problem resolution. No other partner-specific information will be collected.

VMware asks that vendors add these lines to the VDDK configuration file for identification:

vixDiskLib.phoneHome.EnablePhoneHome = 1

vixDiskLib.phoneHome.ProductName = vendorName or ApplicationName

vixDiskLib.phoneHome.ProductVersion = versionNumber

No I don't know where you configure that, but the Fusion menu -> Preferences -> Feedback tab should set all this correctly.

--

Wil

| Author of Vimalin. The virtual machine Backup app for VMware Fusion, VMware Workstation and Player |
| More info at vimalin.com | Twitter @wilva
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bluefirestorm
Champion
Champion

This is not the first time I have seen this "Phone Home". In VMware Fusion, this is seen in the vmware-vmfusion.log which takes the form of

<timestamp> | VMware Fusion| I005: Phone Home: PhoneHome_CreateClient: Creating client for host https://vcsa.vmware.com/ph, collector <product>.<version>, instance <UUID>.

<timestamp> | VMware Fusion| I005: Phone Home: PhoneHome_CreateClient: Will send phone home requests to "https://vcsa.vmware.com/ph/api/hyper/send?_c=<product>.<version>&_i=<UUID>".

Something similar is in Workstation Pro on Linux vmware-ui-nnnn.log. I would think it is the same with Workstation/Player on Windows.

In the Preferences, the "Join the VMware Customer Experience Improve Program" is unchecked but these entries are still logged (I haven't verified if it actually sends something even if unchecked).

It is likely used for other things like checking for updated VMware Tools.

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jim_gill
Expert
Expert

It was a coding error, but the message is informational only. disk-manager and the related tools link with a stub to the Virtual Disk Development kit, not the full kit, so it doesn't load the PhoneHome library and the code incorrectly claimed "VixDiskLib: Failed to initialize PhoneHome library." when linked to the stub. The message is meaningless and has been fixed internally; there's no functionality missing and your defrag/shrink proceeded just fine.

wila
Immortal
Immortal

Thanks Jim.

Always nice when somebody who actually does know the internals jumps in.

Much appreciated.

--

Wil

| Author of Vimalin. The virtual machine Backup app for VMware Fusion, VMware Workstation and Player |
| More info at vimalin.com | Twitter @wilva
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AdamPrice443
Contributor
Contributor

Exact same error comes up with Workstation 16's version of the tool as well. I assume the issue is the same and that some future release will fix it?

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wila
Immortal
Immortal

Hi,

It is just a (confusing) message and one of the developers has confirmed here in this thread that it has been addressed.

So yes, it will be fixed in a future version (not necessarily next release).

--

Wil

| Author of Vimalin. The virtual machine Backup app for VMware Fusion, VMware Workstation and Player |
| More info at vimalin.com | Twitter @wilva
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