VMware Fusion 7/8, OS X El Capitan - Ubuntu VM crashes when connecting an iPhone/iPad over USB

[iTee1510]

Dear developers & community,

I have a problem. Every time I connect my iPhone/iPad/iPod touch over USB to my Ubuntu VM, it is shut down immediately and there is an unspecified error message.

This issue started after I upgraded my host from OS X Yosemite to OS X El Capitan. Before the upgrade it worked just fine and I could access the files on my devices.

I tried it with VMware Fusion 7 and VMware Fusion 8, with my existing Ubuntu 15.04 VM and with a newly created Ubuntu 15.10 VM, but it did not work in any case.

Also, it does not matter if VMware tools are installed on the guest or not, if the guest USB version is set to 3.0 or 2.0, and if USB debugging is enabled or not.

Connecting an iPhone/iPad/iPod touch to a Windows 8/10 VM, however, does not cause any problems, neither on OS X Yosemite nor on OS X El Capitan.

Connecting other hardware like an external hard drive over USB to a Ubuntu VM does also work. Only connecting an iPhone/iPad/iPod touch does not work.

Does anyone have the same issue? If so, could the VMware developers please fix this?

[xtechx]

interesting problem, will try to replicate this later...

[xtechx]

I tested it several times and I can confirm the problem

although one time it randomly worked, very strange...

[iTee1510]

Thanks for the reply. It worked for me one time today, right after updating Fusion to version 8.0.2 and updating the guest VMware tools.

I was happy and surprised that it was fixed so fast, but sadly it wasn't. It only worked one time and did not work when I tried it again after that.

I guess I'll have to boot my Mac to Ubuntu using a bootable USB drive to be able to connect my phone. Very disappointing.

[manman13 · Accepted solution]

Hi,

This issue has been reported to our dev team. We'll update our comments asap if there is any update. Thanks~

[iTee1510]

Thanks, I hope this can be fixed soon since it did work without any problems before.

[iTee1510]

I have an update on the problem. Today I installed VirtualBox to test if it would let me connect my iPhone to a newly created Ubuntu 15.10 VM.

The VM did not crash, but it did not connect the device either. The host showed that the device is not connected to the host anymore. The VirtualBox software showed that the device is connected to the guest. But the guest itself did not show that the device was connected to the guest. Furthermore there was no "Trust this computer" dialogue on my iPhone that would normally appear when I tried to connect it to the guest.

So it looks like the cause of this connection issue is not the VMware Fusion software itself, but something that Apple changed in OS X El Capitan. And the VMware guest crashes because of this unexpected issue.

[iGeek21]

This might be a similar issue: vmware - Virtualized OSX can't see iPhone device - Super User.

El Capitan seems to have introduced a new USB handling system which could be the cause of the problem.

They suggest to switch from USB 3.0 to USB 2.0, but you said that did not work for you, so I'm sorry.

However, maybe this will help the developers to find the cause and to build a workaround.

Best regards--

[iTee1510]

Update 8.1.0 seems to have fixed this problem. Thank you very much.