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sncooper
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Enthusiast

VMware 5.0.3 hanging on OSX 10.8.3 - MacBook Retina mid 2012 8GB Ram (SSD)

Is anyone experiencing hangs on VMware 5.0.3 ?

I was originally on OSX 10.8.2, VMware 5.0.1 (I could not use 5.0.2 because VMware crashed due to the Apple video update.)

I started my Mac this morning, opened VMware, started my Windows 7 VM full screen using 2 monitors (I did not start any other Mac apps.)

I started going through emails, I had been working for 15 minutes and was composing a response to an email in MS Outlook, clicked 'send' and then the Mac beachball appeared, and the VM became unresponsive.

I usually use the centre mouse button to open Mission control to return to the Mac Desktop, this would not work, nor would CTRL-UPARROW.

I tried CTRL-COMMAND-F ... this did not work at first, but after 10 minutes of trying it finally switched VMware to Window mode.

I opened Mac Activity Monitor, and saw that I had 3GB memory free, no swap was being used, and the CPU was at 15%

When I hovered the mouse over the VMware window it changed to a beachball.

I found that I could open other Mac apps (Safari, Mac Mail) and these were working OK - just VMware had locked up.

The VMware menus worked very slowly (they responded 2 minutes after clicking on an option) but I was able to grab Support information.

I need to get on with work, so I have uninstalled 5.0.3, and re-installed 5.0.1 .... so far 5.0.1 is working so I can get on with work, hoping it remains stable for the rest of my working day!

Any one else experiencing similar?

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ColoradoMarmot
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On the odd chance, have you checked the HD to make sure it's not starting to fail? 

And other question:  Did you do the software update version for 10.8.3 or the combo updater?  If the former, try the latter, then repair permissions and reboot.

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sncooper
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Enthusiast

Thanks for the response -

I only know one way to do updates - that's through 'App Store' - that's the way I did it - are you suggesting another way?

It's a factory fitted Solid State Drive in my machine... I checked the "SMART" status in Disk Utility, and had already run a Disk Check & Permissions repair after the first lockup as I had to force a poweroff (all checked out fine.)

Version 5.0.1 had been working fine all morning, so I uninstalled 5.0.1 and re-installed 5.0.2 at lunch time ... it's been fine for 7.5 hours so far (so looking good.)

I'll run a disk check in the Windows 7 VM as well, just in case this indicates anything.

I'll see if it holds out through to tomorrow morning when I wake the mac from sleep, and then take the small step up to 5.0.3.

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ColoradoMarmot
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Very strange.

Apple also releases a 'combo' updater, that includes all the patches since 10.8.0 in a single update.  Many long-time mac users (myself among them) use the combo updaters, as we find it seems to avoid most of the upgrade issues.

http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1640?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US

That's the link for the 10.8.3 combo updater.

SSD's tend to fail completely, all at once, rather than degrade like hard drives did (I've experienced that three times myself), so it's probably not a drive issue.  Repairing permissions is probably still worth it.

Please report back and let us know if it stabilizes when you re-upgrade.

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sncooper
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Thanks for the info - it's appreciated.

Before my original post, I experienced some crashes soon after upgrading to 5.0.3, and was concerned that my issues might have been related to File Vault - I took a clone of my system, and set about to re-installing the machine without File Vault.

On Saturday I re-installed the machine completely from scratch, re-partitoned it first, and then formatted before re-installing the OS.

My machine shipped with Lion (even though Mountain Lion was already out) so I had to install Lion, upgrade to Mountain Lion (it installed 10.8.3 directly)

I then used Migration Assistant to bring back my user directory and apps.

Once I was back up and running, I trashed VMware 5.0.1 and installed VMware 5.0.3.

I went into each VM in turn, and upgraded VMware tools (I support a number of customers products, so I have 8 VM's in total, and these include WinXP, Debian Linux, and a Windows 7 VM.

I verified the disk, repaired permissions, and took a separate clone of this configuration using Carbon Copy Cloner.

Initial signs were good, I spend most of my working day in the Windows 7 VM for email and Office, and use this in combination with Debian, and dip into WinXP form time to time.

Version 5.0.1 works fine, 5.0.2 works better, but each time I put 5.0.3 back I get occasional hangs ... very puzzling.

I guess I could re-download 5.0.3 in case I got a corrupted copy?

Any further suggestions very much appreciated.

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ColoradoMarmot
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Yeah, I doubt it's FileVault - that's pretty darn transparent.

If it were the hard drive, you'd see the issues in both versions.  Ditto on it being an upgrade issue with Fusion.

BTW - you can do a direct install of 10.8 - google for 'lion disk maker' which will convert the downloaded installer into a USB key bootable installer.

At this point, I'd probably suggest submitting a ticket to VMWare for official support - but please post back if they figure out what it was so we all know.

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sncooper
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Some good news -

I uninstalled 5.0.2 this morning, and installed 5.0.3 and it has worked for 12 hours without a single hang.

I am not plugged into an external monitor today, as I am on a customer site, so I'll see how tomorrow goes when I'm on the external display.

I checked my download, and it was not corrupted (did a cmp) so perhaps I did not uninstall it properly the first time?

Hoping to report back good news this time tomorrow Smiley Happy

One observation - I now get large black squares flicker behind the cursor from time to time, this never happened on version 4 - 5.0.2 for me ... it has just started with 5.0.3, although I see a separate thread for that ... I might go back to 5.0.2 after all.

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mnahum
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Hello,

I think I've the same issue.

I've migrated to VMWare 5.0.3 too on OSX 10.8.3 and all become really slow and consume all the RAM.

I can try a clean reinstall of VMWare , remove the VMWare tools and re-install them but it's not look good

I also upgrade from 5.0.1 , maybe it's the issue...

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sncooper
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Hi Mnahum,

Anecdotal evidence in my case seems to be that if I upgraded directly from 5.0.1 to 5.0.3 then I get the issue, I tried it twice and got the same results - although it sometimes took a few hours for the issue to appear (one time only 15 minutes, and I was doing light work - just emails.)

For some reason, this time, going from 5.0.1 > 5.0.2, and then from 5.0.2 > 5.0.3 seems to have resolved the issue for me.

I made sure I re-installed the VMware tools on each upgrade.

I did all the normal things people advise ... disk check, permissions check, PRAM reset, Safe boot ... but in the end it seems jumping from 5.0.1 directly to 5.0.3 seems to have been the issue.

VMware tech guys took a look at my logs and said the VM was taking 100% CPU at the time it hung and asked for me to switch on Performance debugging - however so far no problems to report back to them.

I'm crossing my fingers Smiley Happy

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sncooper
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Enthusiast

My machine hanged after 8 hours of use just before I was due to shutdown for the day.

The last thing I did was drag some files into a Shared folder, the shared folder is my OSX dropbox folder .. wondering if that's the issue.

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mnahum
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I removed the vmware tools

I uninstall VMware 5.0.3 by sending it to the trash

I re-installated VMWare 5.0.1

start my Windows 7 machine , install the tools

I reboot the VM

I shutdown the VM

I installed VMWare 5.0.2

start my Windows 7 machine , re-install the tools

I reboot the VM

I shutdown the VM

I installed VMWare 5.0.3

start my Windows 7 machine , install the tools

I reboot the VM

the issuw is still here ....

somebody know a good tool to see the memory consumtion on MAC OS X ?

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ColoradoMarmot
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I'd 99% say it's the dropbox issue.  Probably safer to just install the DB client in the VM itself.

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sncooper
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Enthusiast

Still having issues ... system hanging 3-4 times a day now.
Holding down the power button has finally destroyed my machine so it would not boot anymore "Recovered Files" were appearing in the Trash.
I have done a complete re-install of Mountain Lion 10.8.3 after re-formatting the disk ... third time in as many days.
I did not install any third party software (so no dropbox or anything else installed) and I did not "migrate" anything over from the backup - I just logged into iCloud for email etc.
What I am saying, is that it is a freshly installed clean machine with just the standard apps + VMware.
I installed VMware 5.0.3 and copied a few VM's back from the backup drive, and ran the Windows file system checks.
I use 'Full screen' with an external monitor, and regularly switch back and forth between them.
Some Microsoft updates came out yesterday, and the VM's rebooted themselves, I impatiently switched back from the VM whilst if rebooted and my machine hung again - however I'm just getting hangs at various times for no apparent reason.
I enabled SSH on my MacBook so that I can still get into it from another machine to see what's going on.
A ran 'top' and saw that many of the VMware processes are in "stuck" state - and can't be killed.
I issued the 'sync' command to get it to write everything out to disk, and then the 'reboot' command.
The machine did not reboot, but seemed to shutdown somewhat, so I turned off by holding the Power button.
I've turned on performance logging in VMware, and am now waiting for it to hang again ... sometimes I have to wait hours for this issue to show up again.
Are there seriously only 2 people experiencing this? - it only started happening since I installed 10.8.3 - conincidence?
MacBookPro top copy.png
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ColoradoMarmot
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At this point I'd suggest logging an official ticket - it's definitely an odd issue.

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mnahum
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

are you serious there? can you give us more information?

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sncooper
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I've had a ticket open for 5 days - very little coming back from VMware Technical support, so I thought I'd post here incase anyone else getting this.

The irony, is since I switched on the special logging they asked me to, the issue has not returned - figures!!

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ColoradoMarmot
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Couple of other ideas:

1) What Antivirus are you using?  Is it configured to scan?

2) Is system restore disabled in the guest?

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mnahum
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

in fact I've installed freememory from the appstore and I can clearly see that my vm use the 4Go alocated to it.

10.8.3 have a bigger footprint than 10.8.2 ... so I'm reaching the limit of my 8Go quickest...

I think it's the explaination ... now can I redust the memory on the footprint off mac osx by turning off some functionalities maybe ...

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sncooper
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Hi dlhotka,

Using Microsoft Essentials Antivirus in the guest, System restore is disabled.

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sncooper
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Well, it happened again within 30 minutes of starting up my Mac ...

This was a clean install on OSX 10.8.3, nothing else installed except for VMware.

I was downloading a few songs from iTunes store.

I was playing a song in iTunes, I was about to prepare my presentation for Monday, so I started VMware, and then started up a VM.

The VM was booting up Windows 7, so I went to switch back to the OSX desktop to see how the downloads were coming along - then the machine froze up.

I was able to SSH into the machine to see what was going on ... stuck VMware processes again, and the system log shows the following:

Screen Shot 2013-03-23 at 11.49.56.png

Mar 23 11:27:36 MBP-Retina kernel[0]: NVDA(OpenGL): Channel timeout!
Mar 23 11:27:36 MBP-Retina kernel[0]: NVDA(OpenGL): Channel exception! exception type = 0x20 = PBDMA Error
Mar 23 11:27:56 MBP-Retina kernel[0]: NVDA(OpenGL): Channel timeout!
Mar 23 11:27:56 MBP-Retina kernel[0]: NVDA(OpenGL): Channel exception! exception type = 0x20 = PBDMA Error
Mar 23 11:27:56 MBP-Retina kernel[0]: 00000069
Mar 23 11:27:56 MBP-Retina kernel[0]: 0000006e
Mar 23 11:27:56 MBP-Retina kernel[0]: 00000001 0000902d 00000000 00000000
Mar 23 11:27:56 MBP-Retina kernel[0]: 00000000 00000100 00000000 0000000f
Mar 23 11:27:56 MBP-Retina kernel[0]: 00000000 00000000 00000000
Mar 23 11:27:56 MBP-Retina kernel[0]: 00000000 00000000

Somehow I don't think the Video driver issue is resolved!

Good thing was that I have all the debug logging switched on in VMware, so hoping the tech guys can now pinpoint this.

The disapointing thing for me is that I can't work on this machine anymore - you do rather look stupid when running a presentation in front of 100+ people and your mac crashes on you, although they do find it rather entertaining!

The general concensus in the room was run Windows on a PC, and OSX on a Mac... and don't bother with this fancy Virtualisation stuff.

That was the final straw .. work are now supplying me with an IBM laptop instead.

(I would rather get the issue resolved so I don't have to carry around two laptops, it's a pain at airport security.)

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