Technogeezer's Accepted Solutions

Fusion 11 is not supported on Big Sur or Monterey. I’m surprised you haven’t had any issues. Not surprising that Fusion 11 won’t install on Monterey since it uses deprecated kernel extensions and does not understand all the changes made to the core OS in Big Sur and later. Fusion 12 was built with these macOS changes in mind.  You need to,upgrade to Fusion 12 which supports Monterey.  If using it for personal (non-commercial) purposes, you can register for a free personal use license of Fusion 12 Player. 

Here's what I've found with the Fedora 35 Live ISO Selecting "Start Fedora Workstation Live" or "Test this media...." result in Fedora booting, but the screen remains blank (I don't get a GNOME login session. I suspect that this is because the kernel is a 5.14 kernel and this kernel provides a virtual graphics adapter for VMware virtual machines. Wayland is configured as the default rendering engine. The VMware virtual graphics driver detected at boot and Wayland are incompatible. I restarted and used "Troubleshooting", and then selected the option to boot with the basic display adapter. This let me get to a graphical session (with mouse and keyboard) where I can install Fedora to the hard drive. However, after installation and before rebooting, you need to drop into a terminal and make sure Wayland is disabled. Before you reboot, open a terminal, and then execute: sudo vi /mnt/sysroot/etc/gdm/custom.conf Uncomment the following line: #WaylandEnable=false And save and exit the editor. Reboot.  Upon reboot the system will automatically come up in a graphical session with keyboard and mouse - from which you continue setup of Fedora.

Some thoughts Make sure Parallels tools are uninstalled in your imported VM, and install VMware Tools.  Check your hard disk and CD settings to make sure they are not pointing to the file that is being referenced.  What exactly do you mean by “I can’t access any disks or files on the Mac”? (and it’s a Mac, not MAC). Are you saying that you can’t access the folders from your Windows VM? If so, you need VMware Tools installed in the VM and you need to configure folder sharing in your VM’s preferences. 

I've been able to get the Alpine Standard 3.14-2 aarch64 distribution up and running on the Tech Preview. I had to select "Other Linux 5.x kernel 64-bit ARM" as the VM type.  It will recognize both the virtual network adapter and the default virtual NVMe disk. However, Alpine ships with a 5.10 Linux kernel. That's below the recommended 5.14 and 5.13 kernel versions that VMware discusses in the TP guide. For the tech preview, VMware seems to have focused on ARM versions that are more popular and have access to the latest Linux kernel versions. With a 5.10 kernel, you won't have access to the VMware virtual graphics driver that will allow you to resize the screen resolution. And I've found that with this 5.10 kernel the VM will not power down when the system is shut down (even with the community provided open-vm-tools available from the apk community repository). It's usable in its basic form, but your mileage may vary... Also, note that the boot order defaults to CD-ROM, PXE (both IPv4 and IPv6) then the hard drive. Which means that after installing to the hard drive you need to disconnect your ISO before booting from it, and waiting while the 2 PXE boots time out. You can change this behavior by changing the boot order. Start the VM using "Power On To Firmware" and then use the EFI menus to change the boot order.  

Fusion 10 is not supported nor tested on Catalina so it’s not surprising that a Fusion 11 workaround doesn’t work. A lot of under the hood changes were made in Catalina (such as the security model) that Fusion had to be modified to accommodate. Catalina is supported by Fusion 11.5 and 12.  (See the host OS compatibility list at https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2088571 I’d consider going right to Fusion 12. Fusion 11.x reached its end of general support on 12/19/2020, while Fusion 12 is still fully supported. Fusion Player 12 also has the advantage of having a free personal use license if you’re not using it for commercial purposes. 

The VMware Fusion process is the GUI, not the virtual machines themselves. The memory used by the VMs can be found by examining vmware-vmx processes. Fusion spins up one vmware-vmx process (which is the actual hypervisor) for each VM that you are running. The Activity Monitor doesn't give you a good way to say "this vmware-vmx instance is running this VM".  You might be able to infer which is which, but I think the definitive answer may be found by examining the VM's log to see if it records a process ID for the vmx process it fires up for the VM. If you look at the memory in use by the vmx processes, you'll probably see that the memory in use may be less than the total that you have allocated for the VMs. If I remember correctly, Fusion doesn't grab the entire allocated memory from the host when you start a VM. The amount of memory used on the host by the vmx process will depend on how the VM uses memory. Fusion will request more memory for a VM from the host  up to the amount that you specify as the VM needs it.

From what you've posted, it appears to me that Fusion has been installed successfully. The "Select the Installation Method" dialog you're seeing is Fusion trying to be helpful and guide you into creating your first virtual machine. Quit VMware Fusion at this point, and eject the mounted installation disk image (so that you don't open the Fusion installer when you should be opening the installed copy on your disk). Continue with your procedure at step 5 to download your .ova format virtual appliance.

It sounds like your Mac is configured to log out accounts after 30 minutes of inactivity. Which would try to stop VMware Fusion as part of the logout, and would generate the messages that you are seeing. You can check this by opening the Security & Privacy preference panel in System Preferences. In the General tab, authenticate as an administrator by clicking on the lock at the bottom of the panel, then click the Advanced button at the bottom of the panel. See if the check box next to "Log out after xxx minutes of inactivity" is checked. If it is, you can uncheck it to stop the automatic log out. Or you can change it to some longer value ( but if you don't have a good idea how long the game will last, disabling the auto logoff may be the better choice). 

What's happening is that the VM is probably defaulting to a virtual AMD PCnet NIC interface, for which neither Windows 7 nor VMware Tools has a driver for x64 hosts. The proper virtual NIC type for this guest OS is an Intel E1000 device - which Windows 7 provides out of the box. Ensure that the vmx file for your virtual machine has the following line in it ethernet0.virtualDev = "e1000"

This has nothing to do with the Mac or your Fusion software installation. It has to do with the virtual disk type that's being set when the virtual machine is created. Fusion (and other VMware hosted products) support virtual disk devices as either SCSI (BusLogic compatible SCSI controller) devices or IDE devices. What's probably happening (as the previous posters have noted) is that the virtual hard drive that's being created is a SCSI hard drive. You can confirm this by opening up the virtual machine's Settings, click on Hard Disks, and note whether it says IDE or SCSI disk for the virtual disk. Since Windows XP installation disks don't have the required SCSI driver in them by default, you have to do one of the following: Inject the VMware-provided SCSI drivers into Windows Setup (just as you would any other device that doesn't have a driver on the XP installation disk). The VMware-provided driver is on a virtual floppy disk that you "insert" into the virtual floppy drive (see VMware Fusion Help for how to make a floppy image accessible to the virtual floppy drive). From there the process is exactly like adding a driver in a physical machine. As rcardona2k says, using the Easy Install option automates this task for you. or Make sure your virtual machine has an IDE virtual disk. You don't have to totally recreate your virtual machine - you can take your existing one, open its Settings, click on Hard Disks , delete the existing hard drive, and add a new hard disk with an IDE bus type (and the other options and size you wish). Anecdotally, SCSI virtual hard disks perform slightly better than IDE, but you may or may not notice the difference.

What's kind of NIC hardware is Windows 7 asking about when it asks for a device driver? What does the Device Manager say about the networking card that it's found? If Windows 7 is like Vista, it probably doesn't have a AMD PCnet NIC driver out of the box. If you upgraded from a Windows XP VM, the NIC is probably being offered to the VM as the PCnet NIC, which would explain why Windows 7 is complaining about a missing driver. My bet is that Windows 7 VMs have the same default virtual NIC type as Vista VMs. (I don't have a copy of Fusion 3 yet to try this out). The defaults for Vista VMs are, I believe, an Intel e1000 NIC, which Vista had an out-of-the-box driver for. Try shutting down the VM (not suspend), modify the VM's OS type setting to reflect that it's a Windows 7 VM, not a Windows XP VM and then reboot the VM. See if the NIC gets a device driver claimed. If that doesn't work, shut down the VM, exit Fusion, and add the following line to the .vmx file found in the VM's bundle: ethernet0.virtualDev = "e1000" Start Fusion and the VM and see if the device gets a driver assigned properly.

Cannot open the disk '/Users/SAVVY/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/Virtual Machines/Boot Camp/%2Fdev%2Fdisk0/Boot Camp partition.vmwarevm/Boot Camp partition.vmdk' or one of the snapshot disks it depends on. Reason: The file specified is not a virtual disk I have looked at some of the other articles and they says to go to the Library\Application Support\VMware Fusion\Virtual Machine and to delete the Virtual Machine folder..... Only problem is that I don't have such a folder. Make sure you are looking for the right folder - the Boot Camp virtual machine is found in the Library folder that's part of your user ID, and not the system wide /Library folder. If you're using the Terminal the path to the folder containing the Boot Camp virtual machine bundle will be: "/Users/SAVVY/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/Virtual Machines/Boot Camp" if your user name is SAVVY (as noted in the error message). You should also find it from the Finder:, click on the "Go" menu, and select "Home". In the Finder window that then shows up, navigate through the Library, Application Support, VMware Fusion and Virtual Machine folders and you should find the Boot Camp virtual machine. What's the exact version of Fusion that you're running? If you're indeed running Fusion 2.0, you should download one of the updates - such as 2.0.5 (or the 2.0.6 beta if you're running Snow Leopard 10.6).

It looks to me like the Parallels conversion configured Fusion for the PCnet NIC type. You shouldn't need to hack around trying to find a PCnet driver for Windows 7. Instead, try forcing the virtual network adapter to be an Intel e1000 NIC type (IIRC that's the default for a Vista VM). Edit the VM's .vmx file (with Fusion shut down), and either a) add this line, or b) change an existing line starting with ethernet0.virtualDev to match this: ethernet0.virtualDev = "e1000" and see if Windows finds the adapter and associates a driver with it.

Probably not a Fusion problem per se, and you should troubleshoot it like you would if you had a physical disk. I would check the partitioning and/or logical volume setup of the (virtual) boot disk that was done upon install of RHEL 5. I don't know what Easy Install does out of the box. Just like a physical disk, if it didn't set up the disk to your expectations, there might not be the free space you'd expect allocated to the file systems. If your boot disk has been set up to use LVM and there's space not allocated to a volume on the disk, you may be able to expand the volume/file system containing your home directory. Better yet, don't use Easy Install. If you're knowledgeable enough to install Red Hat Enterprise Linux, you don't need the training wheels of Easy Install

I like Fusion as much as anyone here and use it a lot. But, saying that... You're using this for something really important - your college final. You need it to work at best performance with as few problems as possible since you don't have a lot of time left (in the grand scheme of things) in your semester. My advice - Don't experiment. Bypass Fusion (as heretical as that sounds on this forum) and run Premiere and AfterEffects in a natively booted Windows XP OS that's on a BootCamp partition. Video editing will stress the I/O and graphics performance of your system - and nothing works better for that than native access to the system. Running dual CPUs in a VM with Fusion on a machine with 2 cores may not result in best performance and is not recommended.

Is your external drive formatted as a FAT drive or Mac OS Extended? If it's a FAT-formatted drive (as most USB drives are out-of-the-box), then a second question: did you select the option to create the VM's disks with the "split into 2GB files" option? If not, that explains the problem. FAT formatted drives are limited to a max individual file size of 4GB. The Mac OS files that Fusion creates to house the virtual disk will in most cases be larger than that if you do not choose the split disk option. You have one of two choices if this is the case: 1) Reformat the USB drive (with the Mac's Disk Utility) as a Mac OS Extended formatted drive. Once you do this, all data currently on the drive will be lost, and you will not be able to use the drive with Windows. or 2) Convert the VM's disk to "split into 2GB files". With Fusion 2.x you can do this directly from the VM's settings. You should then be able to copy the VM onto your USB drive.

I assume that you set up additional virtual networks in Fusion using something like: , since vmnet2 doesn't come configured out of the box with Fusion, and there's no way in the GUI to do it. I'm interpreting what you're trying to do as creating two virtual NICs in a VM both bridged to the same physical NIC in the Mac. Can you explain what you're trying to accomplish by doing this? This configuration could result in two interfaces with an IP address on the same subnet, which many UNIX-like (and Windows) kernels don't take very kindly to. You may also need to check Ubuntu's network configuration (to make sure that the new NIC is enabled and configured).