VM Tools on older MacOS

gringley · ‎09-13-2019

I had gotten away from my MacOS VMs for a year or so and was bringing them all up to speed this week. I discovered that Fusion stopped updating tools for "pre15" MacOS and I had to set the clock back to 2017 to upgrade tools on the older VMs. When I started all my VMs were on 10.0.12.325 (build-4448491). The version with Fusion 11.1.1 is 10.0.12.2027 (build-11054227). I found these things out:

None of the older VMs can use full resolution for Retina display. (Well you can check the box I just can't squint hard enough to read the text after that.)

10.10 - Could not upgrade to 10.0.12.2027 - VM lost ability to run tools after the upgrade and I had to restore a backup.

10.9 - Could not upgrade to 10.0.12.2027 - VM lost ability to run tools after the upgrade and I had to restore a backup.

10.8 - Could upgrade to 10.0.12.2027.

10.7 - Could upgrade to 10.0.12.2027.

I am curious why I could not upgrade to the "current" pre15 tools on the "newer" MacOS?

I am also curious if there is any kind of guidance on what the highest level of virtual hardware I should be using with the various older MacOS? All these were on version 14 for hardware.

zhus · ‎09-25-2019

It is a problem of the frozen tools 10.0.12.2027 for Darwin pre15 version in Fusion 11. Has reported it to engineer team. Thanks for reporting.

The tools 10.0.12.325 could be used as the workaround currently.

For the old guests, you can also upgrade to the highest hardware version supported in the current Fusion version.

gringley · ‎09-25-2019

It turns out the working VMs were on 10.0.12.325 so that is addressed. As a troubleshooting step, I tried going backwards in hardware versions based on the hardware version that was current when the OS was released. I found a "floor" at hardware version 11 however as version 10 did not support the camera device. I am wondering if someone has complied the highest hardware versions a version of macOS can run without generating mystery devices or other incompatibilities? Based on my experience with Windows VMs it is not a good idea to upgrade the older OS VMs to the newer hardware versions after a certain point.