Fusion Pause - no USB after resume

[Conutz]

On Fusion 10 Pro, I experience the following:

1. Pause a Windows VM (not Suspend).
2. Time passes...
3. Resume the Windows VM. At this point, any USB device I plug into or that was already plugged my MacBook is not available.
4. In order to use USB once more, I need to Suspend (or reboot) and then Resume the VM.

Any clues as to why?

[RickShu]

Hi Conutz,

How long did you pause the VM? In step 3 you mentioned 'resume the Windows', was your VM suspended? Or, was your Mac Host ever slept?

Regards,

-Rick

[Conutz]

Hi RickShu​,

thanks for responding. The time under Pause varies from a few minutes to hours, but behaviour remains the same. Apologies, by Resume I mean “un-pause”.

Thanks,

Conutz

[RickShu]

Hi Conutz​,

I still have some questions need to confirm with you since I'm unable to reproduce your problem in house.

1. After Unpause the VM, are your USB devices disappeared in both Host and VM? Or just disappeared from VM? Can you re-connect it to VM manually?

2. When the problem occurs,  what happened if you plug another USB device to your Mac?

3. When the problem occurs, can you find the Process 'vmware-usbarbitrator' from Activity Monitor?

Thanks & Regards,

-Rick

[Conutz]

Hi RickShu​,

Apologies, I have been away on course. I will do some tests and answer your questions.

[ColoradoMarmot]

There was a bug way back that was similar.  If you try moving the USB device to a different physical port on the Mac (not just in a hub), does it then detect and connect?

[Conutz]

It's all the USB devices that disappear from the Fusion "Connect USB Devices" list under the "USB and Bluetooth" settings. I was just able to replicate it again. Here are the steps:

1. Two Windows 7 VMs running. (I have 32GB RAM and 6 cores )
2. On leaving work last night, I Paused both VMs and closed the lid on my MacBook, i.e. Sleep.
3. On arriving home, a client needed support. I opened my MacBook and while working needed resources from one of the VMs, so I unpaused it. I didn't check whether USB was available as I didn't need it.
4. On completing the support, I closed my MacBook's lid, leaving the unpaused VM running.
5. This morning I have the following scenario:
   1. Unpaused VM: can see all my attached "USB" devices "Apple iBridge", etc. - a total of 6 items in the list.
   2. Paused VM: on unpausing I have zero items under the USB device list.

So this is an interesting situation, one VM with resources, the other not. If I Suspend the VM and Restore it, the USB ports are there once more.

I'll answer RickShu​ here as well:

1. Only missing on VM, as apparent from above.
2. If I plug another device in, the VM is unaware of it, while Mac OS is.
3. I see 'vmware-usbarbitrator' and 'VMWare USB Arbitrator Service'.

[ColoradoMarmot]

I'm not sure of your terminology here - what do you mean by pause?  Suspend is when you hit the || button.  Shut down is when the guest OS actually shuts down.

I'm sure you already did, but might be worth manually verifying that you're on current release of Fusion, and have updated both the virtual hardware and VMWare tools in the guest.

Did you try, on the one that fails, to physically unplug the USB devices and plug them back into a different port?  If you're using a hub you can just move that plug from one to another.

[Conutz]

Pause is a menu option: "Virtual Machine" -> "Pause".

Definitely latest release of Fusion 10 Pro and this issue has been there for as long as I can remember, it's just never bugged me enough to seek answers. I started on Fusion 4 or earlier, although I can't confirm if it started that early. It's also been present with at least three different MacBook models.

Yes, physically unplugged makes no difference - as per my email above, even the built-in USB devices disappear. They only come back after Suspending and Resuming. Give it a try yourself. 

[ColoradoMarmot]

Guess they changed the terminology a few versions back I missed 🙂

That's been working for me for years, so it's definitely an anomaly on your system, very odd.

[wila]

Hi,

PMJI, nope pause is not suspend. They are different things.

With suspend you are basically sleeping your VM, it will release the memory and CPU it uses.

With pause you just temporarily put it to a stop. It "stuns" the VM, the memory will be assigned to the VM, but the CPU can temporarily be used elsewhere.

I honestly have never used it beyond a few "this is how it works" trials.

But then again I was rarely CPU bound. In the past I would always first run out of RAM, not CPU resources.

See also:

Pause a Virtual Machine

and:

Suspend and Resume a Virtual Machine in Fusion

(pointed to the Fusion 8 docs, not sure anymore when it was introduced, but before Fusion 😎

--

Wil

[ColoradoMarmot]

Yet they use a pause icon to suspend the VM in the toolbar!