Running VMWare Fusion 6 on Mac OS X Yosemite Beta

[kior22]

Hi,

I would like to know if VMWare Fusion 6 will work on the Mac OS X Yosemite Beta that apple has just released. I use the VMWare for work so I can't afford upgrading to the Beta and not having Fusion working.

Thanks!

Regards,

Sebastian

[niallmca]

Hello Darius,

At this stage do you have a rough idea if Fusion6 will work with Yosemite Beta ... in days/weeks/months..?

If it's just a few days, then I'll stick with Yosemite Beta.

But if it's at least a few weeks or maybe months, then I'll have to rollback to Mavericks.

I tried VirtualBox, and it worked ..sortof .. at least I could load up the VM.  But it wasn't good enough to use - the mouse was all over the place!

I've heard Parallels might work, but I haven't tried it.

I know you probably don't know for sure how long, but you can give some indication of the timeframe to get Fusion 6 working with Yosemite Beta, that would be very helpful.

Thanks.

Best regards,

Niall.

[kennydiggins]

I can confirm that Parallels does work, I am using the 14 day trial to *hopefully* get me through until Fusion is working.

[MacsRule]

kior22 wrote:

I would like to know if VMWare Fusion 6 will work on the Mac OS X Yosemite Beta that apple has just released. I use the VMWare for work so I can't afford upgrading to the Beta and not having Fusion working...

While I would never install a factory fresh Alpha OS, which is what Yosemite's first ß release appears to be, on a work machine, I've read that Fusion 6 will run if, instead of double-clicking on the application, you view the contents of the Fusion app, then run Fusion.app/Contents/MacOS/fusionbinary. A terminal window will also open and closing that will quit Fusion too. Again, I haven't actually tried this so I don't know how usable Fusion would be once it's running.

BTW, in installing Yosemite in one partition of a USB 3.0 flash drive with four partitions which already have two other bootable OS's, Yosemite turned the flash drive from media with a GUID partition table into a Logical Volume Group, which is yet another reason not to risk a work drive testing Yosemite.

[SvenGus]

But installing OS X Yosemite on a USB 3.0 flash drive entirely dedicated to 10.10 DP could probably be an interesting option, especially with a fast flash drive (like the SanDisk Extreme and others, or even a Windows To Go-enabled drive like the Kingston DataTraveler Workspace; etc. etc.): it would also be easily portable between different machines.

[ColoradoMarmot]

Fusion 6 may never work with 10.10.  You'll want to watch the 2014 tech preview Darius referred to.

[MacsRule]

Sven G wrote:

But installing OS X Yosemite on a USB 3.0 flash drive entirely dedicated to 10.10 DP could probably be an interesting option, especially with a fast flash drive (like the SanDisk Extreme and others, or even a Windows To Go-enabled drive like the Kingston Data Traveler Workspace; etc. etc.): it would also be easily portable between different machines.

Except for the dedication part, that's exactly what I did and why I did it. The switch to Logical Volume Group shouldn't happen but isn't a problem since the other partitions are still bootable into ML or Mavericks, and should appear as GUID if plugged into a system running Snow Leopard or Lion, neither of which has that bug in Disk Utility that was introduced in ML and continued in Mavericks. What I didn't expect was that an OS installation on one partition would affect all the others. It even renamed the "Media" line shown in Disk Utility from the device name to "Yosemite."

The drive is a PNY and is remarkably fast for a flash drive. And although not cheap, it's more disposable than an internal or external SSD if it came to that.

[mmaciukiewicz]

Is this really working? I've tried the last version. It start but when I've tried to run converted image or install fresh new it hang my macbook

[gyb]

I tried Macsrule's comment about Fusion 6 working when running the binary called VMware Fusion in VMware Fusion.app/Contents/MacOS.

I tried a positive test on Mavericks 10.9.3 first, to make sure the app should launch, and it did and worked fine.

I then tried it on Yosemite 10.10, and whilst the Fusion launcher with your library of VMs appears, It fails to launch a VM.

I tried a Linux VM I had (SLES 11 SP3) and the following error messages appear as pop-ups:-

"Unable to retrieve kernel symbols"

"Failed to initialize monitor device"

"Internal error"

I then tried launching a Windows 7 VM and a OS/X Lion VM (10.7), but they had the same error messages too.

[rich4321]

@ dariusd. Actually Yosemite preview does work on Fusion 6.0.2 as a guest. .

[dariusd]

Yep, it works as a guest, but it is not officially supported, and there certainly are a few issues.  We've encountered very poor performance in some configurations.  The boot process sometimes takes several minutes... and uses the wrong color scheme!  FileVault does not work at all inside the guest anymore – enabling FileVault renders the VM unbootable.  We'll be working on those issues and generally validating that Yosemite works reliably as a guest before we declare support for it.  In the meantime, if none of the known issues are critical to you, it works well enough to use and experiment with it.

Thanks,

--

Darius

[MacsRule]

gyb wrote:

I tried Macsrule's comment about Fusion 6 working when running the binary called VMware Fusion in VMware Fusion.app/Contents/MacOS.

I tried a positive test on Mavericks 10.9.3 first, to make sure the app should launch, and it did and worked fine.

I then tried it on Yosemite 10.10, and whilst the Fusion launcher with your library of VMs appears, It fails to launch a VM.

I tried a Linux VM I had (SLES 11 SP3) and the following error messages appear as pop-ups:-

"Unable to retrieve kernel symbols"

"Failed to initialize monitor device"

"Internal error"...

I was eventually able to try it too by installing the Technology Preview on the Yosemite partition of the flash drive. Fusion did launch but trying to open a Windows VM immediately got those error messages. Thinking there might be something about a preexisting VM,  I tried to create a VM from scratch but before that could get off the ground, those errors occurred again suggesting that something in the Fusion code is the issue rather than an interaction with a VM.

[niallmca]

kennydiggins wrote:

I can confirm that Parallels does work, I am using the 14 day trial to *hopefully* get me through until Fusion is working.

Ok, I got Parallels working with my Bootcamp Win7-64.

The VM starts up, and I can login to Windows.

So far so good.

However, after a few seconds, the Mac does a full reboot (some kind of kernel crash maybe?)

I tried allocating 4GB RAM, and 4 CPUs to the VM ... incase it was just a resource issue.

But, it looks to me that Parallels isn't working properly on Yosemite Beta OSX10.10

The VM is unusable because it just crashes all the time after a little while.

I'm thinking I'll need to revert back to Mavericks.

However, Parallels looks better than Fusion ... so unless Fusion gets fixed soon for OSX10.10,

then I maybe will be leaving VMWare for Parallels.

Thanks.

[kennydiggins]

niallmca wrote:

kennydiggins wrote:

I can confirm that Parallels does work, I am using the 14 day trial to *hopefully* get me through until Fusion is working.

Ok, I got Parallels working with my Bootcamp Win7-64.

The VM starts up, and I can login to Windows.

So far so good.

However, after a few seconds, the Mac does a full reboot (some kind of kernel crash maybe?)

I tried allocating 4GB RAM, and 4 CPUs to the VM ... incase it was just a resource issue.

But, it looks to me that Parallels isn't working properly on Yosemite Beta OSX10.10

The VM is unusable because it just crashes all the time after a little while.

I'm thinking I'll need to revert back to Mavericks.

However, Parallels looks better than Fusion ... so unless Fusion gets fixed soon for OSX10.10,

then I maybe will be leaving VMWare for Parallels.

Thanks.

Interesting... Parallels is working fine for me on my Bootcamp Windows 8.1 with only 2GB RAM and 4 CPUs. I have 10.10 installed on a 2009 Mac Pro with 12GB RAM and am running both OSes from an SSD.

Hopefully they will have Fusion working soon and this won't be an issue.

[thoerr]

You can run your Fusion Machine in Virtual Box until they get this figured out.

1. Find your Fusion machine, right click, show package contents, select all, and copy to a location you can find.

2. Install VirtualBox.

3. Create new machine, name it something, choose, operating system of Fusion Machine and set memory etc as Fusion machine is setup.

4. When it comes time to create drive, use existing and fusion machine you copied.

5. Save it, and it should work. There are not near the features as fusion but at least you have access to the machine until things get figured out. I would not use the original machine but make a copy as noted above.

[adamjgmiller]

Thank you!! our hero I believe, thoerr

[niallmca]

ok, that worked - thanks!

although I got blue screen at first until I changed controller from SATA to IDE.

The VM is really slow, and graphics very slow to update.

Also, the screen won't auto resize.

So, it's definitely better than nothing.  But really only a very short term stopgap until Fusion is fixed.

[thoerr]

I had no blue screen. I bumped up the graphics memory to 256mb and turned on 2D and 3D acceleration. I saw a marked improvement after that. I also uninstalled vmware tools which seemed to conflict some with the mouse. It is not the same as fusion but is livable until they get a beta out that works. I was also able to get a maximum screen resolution of 1600x1200 which is not bad on my thunderbolt screen. Speed seems ok. I have 16GB of ram and am using 6GB for the virtual machine running Win 8.1 64x and also have a solid state drive, so not sure if that makes a difference.

Update; I also found if you install the Virtual Box Guest Additions (similar to VMware Tools) takes care of the screen resolution issue. The full screen mode now works along with seamless mode.

Good luck.

[mbender71]

My needs for virtualization primarily are for running ubuntu servers to allow me to test & develop

web backend technologies such as redis, mongodb, nodejs, docker, etc. Since I never install a

graphical interface version of Ubuntu, VirtualBox is just the perfect fit for me right now and I

can't thank thoerr enough to remind me of (and install) VirtualBox. I'm back in the game!!!

Since owning and running all the version of VMWare Fusion since the original first came out I

can say that VMWare doesn't give Fusion super top priority when it comes to "fixing" things. I do

hope in this case they take OS X 10.10 a little more serious than in the past but then again

we get what we deserve when we load alpha/beta versions of OS's....

Many thanks!

[ColoradoMarmot]

There is no 3d acceleration available for OSX guests.  The switch shouldn't be functional (I'll log that as a bug).

[jason_farrow]

I have OS X 10.10 Yosemite working as a guest on Fusion 6.0.3 on a new MacBook Pro 13" Retina.

There is a definite lag in performance and at times there is a freeze (not a spinning beachball of death) of between 30-60 seconds before the VM wakes up and continues with OS processing.

I have the same OS X 10.10 installed in a native partition and booting to native on the MacBook shows no performance issues.

The Retina pass-through does work but the display settings do not allow for scaling and I cannot work with 2600X1680 pixels. Turning off retina pass-through makes the display usable but not sharp.

There is clearly an issue with Fusion and OS X 10.10 as a guest but if you can cope with the lag you can test it. Role on Fusion 6.0.4 or whatever.

The only OS X bug I have seen so far was during the setup of iCloud when a keychain helper agent locked up and could not be killed. However it is early days and the day job calls.