Possible workaround for the nonpersistance bug in WS 16

[continuum]

If you used the nonpersistance flag for VMDKs in previous good versions of Workstation you are probably as disapointed as I was when I realised that WS 16.2.3 simply can no longer deal with nonpersistance correctly.
In current Workstation the redolog will be discarded at poweroff or reboot of the VM.

I think I found an ugly workaround that may help some of you guys.
Instead of setting the nonpersistance flag per vmdk in the vmx-file we can set the regular RW-flag in the vmdk-descriptor to RDONLY (for each slice)
The result looks like this:














You get 4 choices:
ALLOW
ALLOW ALL
DENY
DENY ALL
If you select ALLOW ALL - all writes will be allowed for the current session.
After next boot you have to decide again.

I know that this is quite something different than the nonpersistance flag but still it may help some of you.

In the descriptor change

Spoiler

# Disk DescriptorFile
version=1
encoding="UTF-8"
CID=cc08fd0d
parentCID=ffffffff
createType="twoGbMaxExtentSparse"

# Extent description
RW 8323072 SPARSE "rdonly-s001.vmdk"
RW 8323072 SPARSE "rdonly-s002.vmdk"
RW 8323072 SPARSE "rdonly-s003.vmdk"
RW 8323072 SPARSE "rdonly-s004.vmdk"
RW 8323072 SPARSE "rdonly-s005.vmdk"
RW 327680 SPARSE "rdonly-s006.vmdk"

# The Disk Data Base
#DDB

ddb.adapterType = "lsilogic"
ddb.geometry.cylinders = "2610"
ddb.geometry.heads = "255"
ddb.geometry.sectors = "63"
ddb.longContentID = "8054e38700c9a2455bb1090acc08fd0d"
ddb.uuid = "60 00 C2 94 06 db 70 d3-89 74 1c c9 fc 4d 24 74"
ddb.virtualHWVersion = "19"

to

Spoiler

# Disk DescriptorFile
version=1
encoding="UTF-8"
CID=cc08fd0d
parentCID=ffffffff
createType="twoGbMaxExtentSparse"

# Extent description
RDONLY 8323072 SPARSE "rdonly-s001.vmdk"
RDONLY 8323072 SPARSE "rdonly-s002.vmdk"
RDONLY 8323072 SPARSE "rdonly-s003.vmdk"
RDONLY 8323072 SPARSE "rdonly-s004.vmdk"
RDONLY 8323072 SPARSE "rdonly-s005.vmdk"
RDONLY 327680 SPARSE "rdonly-s006.vmdk"

# The Disk Data Base
#DDB

ddb.adapterType = "lsilogic"
ddb.geometry.cylinders = "2610"
ddb.geometry.heads = "255"
ddb.geometry.sectors = "63"
ddb.longContentID = "8054e38700c9a2455bb1090acc08fd0d"
ddb.uuid = "60 00 C2 94 06 db 70 d3-89 74 1c c9 fc 4d 24 74"
ddb.virtualHWVersion = "19"

Stupid side-effect: all denied changes go into nirwana directly - no way to decide at a later time 😠

Ulli