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chuckufarley
Contributor
Contributor

VMware Fusion 4 and Mavericks

Is VMware Fusion 4.x expected to be compatible with Mavericks?

Parallels Desktop have just declared in an email to customers that Parallels Desktop 7 will _not_ be compatible with Mavericks, so I thought it prudent to check how the upgrade to the latest version of OS X will affect my other VMMs.

Thanks.

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ColoradoMarmot
Champion
Champion

No, Fusion 4 is two versions old.  Upgrade to Fusion 6.

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chuckufarley
Contributor
Contributor

Wow, being on the internet is like holding up a placard saying, "Treat me like shit!"

Fine, if upgrading is such an easy proposition, I guess you'll happily donate the required £50?

I'll post my PayPal address forthwith.

Anyone with with a decent bone in their body prepared to both provide an answer and back it up with a trustworthy source?

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ColoradoMarmot
Champion
Champion

Most of us participate here in our free time to help other folks out, often with limited time.  I'm sorry if my short answer isn't to your liking, so here's a longer one.

The answer is no, Fusion 4 does not, and will not, support 10.9 as either guest or host.  Fusion 4 came out in 2011, and hasn't been a current or supported version since Fusion 5 was released in 2012.  It barely has support for 10.8.  Even Fusion 5 doesn't really have good 10.9 support.  As you noted, all of the virtualization vendors drop support for older engines when newer operating systems come out, and 10.9 changed a lot of the internal plumbing and boot sequences. 

You may be able to get Fusion 5 working with 10.9, but since Fusion 6 was just released, and has full support, it's the better option to upgrade to.

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chuckufarley
Contributor
Contributor

Look I appreciate you expanding on your answer, but without citing a source I'm afraid it's just your opinion, and I've been misled by too many opinions to be satisfied with that now.

I'd find a source on the VMware website myself, but it's a bit of a maze and searches have revealed nothing so far.

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WoodyZ
Immortal
Immortal

What dlhotka has told you re: VMware Fusion 4 is correct!

Directly from VMware's web site it states the latest Host OS that officially supports running VMware Fusion 4.1 is Mac OS X 10.7.1 and as a Guest OS under VMware Fusion 4.1 is Mac OS X 10.7.x.  Additionally at the current time the latest release of VMware Fusion 5 (5.0.2) does not officially support OS X 10.9 Mavericks as either a Host OS or Guest OS.  At the present time OS X 10.9 Mavericks is officially supported only with VMware Fusion 6 as a Host OS or Guest OS.

Now on a personal note base on over 10 years of using VMware products as well as using VMware Fusion since its pre-version 1 betas I'm quite comfortably and confident stating that OS X 10.9 Mavericks will not be officially supported as a Host OS or Guest OS with VMware Fusion 4.x.

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WoodyZ
Immortal
Immortal

chuckufarley wrote: I'd find a source on the VMware website myself, but it's a bit of a maze and searches have revealed nothing so far.

I just have to shake my head when Users make statements such as that!  How hard is it to go to http://www.vmware.com, click Support > Compatibility Guides and then under Supported Guest and Host Operating Systems click View the Guest/Host OS tab on the VMware Compatibility Guide Web site.!? Smiley Wink

BTW... If you can't find the answers yourself and you're going to be unwilling to accept the answers provided by longstanding and knowledgable members of the community then please don't waste our time asking! Smiley Wink

Message was edited by: WoodyZ - Originally posted: Sep 23, 2013 10:46 AM

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chuckufarley
Contributor
Contributor

Let's start again.  My original question:

Is VMware Fusion 4.x expected to be compatible with Mavericks?

In all the responses so far, not one person has addressed the matter of compatibility.  What I have had so far is this:

No, Fusion 4 is two versions old.

The answer is no, Fusion 4 does not, and will not, support 10.9 as either guest or host.

There were no citations for this, so this is just one user's opinion. Not exactly conclusive.

Directly from VMware's web site it states the latest Host OS that officially supports running VMware Fusion 4.1 is Mac OS X 10.7.1

at the current time the latest release of VMware Fusion 5 (5.0.2) does not officially support OS X 10.9 Mavericks as either a Host OS or Guest OS.  At the present time OS X 10.9 Mavericks is officially supported only with VMware Fusion 6 as a Host OS or Guest OS.

I'm quite comfortably and confident stating that OS X 10.9 Mavericks will not be officially supported as a Host OS or Guest OS with VMware Fusion 4.x.

(emphasis mine)

Two problems here:

1) VMware Fusion works just fine on OS X 10.8.4 "Mountain Lion"—I'm using it right now.  Apparently, the "latest Host OS that officially supports running VMware Fusion 4.1 is Mac OS X 10.7.1".  So, "official support" ≠ "compatible".  QED.

2) Each of these quoted statements uses variations of the phrase, "official support".  I'm not asking about "official support", I'm asking whether or not it will be compatible.  As my point in (1) demonstrates, official support bears very little, if any, relation to compatibility.  I'm not sure how much clearer I could be on that point.

I just have to shake my head when Users make statements such as that!  How hard is it to go to http://www.vmware.com, click Support > Compatibility Guides and then under Supported Guest and Host Operating Systems click View the Guest/Host OS tab on the VMware Compatibility Guide Web site.!?

Well, given I'm not the only person not to have found this guide, it can't be that intuitive to find.  The alternative, of course, would be that you are casting aspersions on my ability to navigate a website—well, go ahead, but resorting to ad hominem isn't a great way to respond to people on a forum.

Interestingly, I did follow your link to the page you mentioned, and was unable to gain any results at all.  I entered the following information, with the remaining fields left at their defaults:

Product name: Fusion

Product Release Version: 4.1

OS Family Name: OS X 10.8 (and also, separately, 10.9)

OS Vendor: Apple

It's actually an odd page.  The field at the top of the page marked, "Search Compatibility Guide" seems to be independent of the fields below.  If I leave it blank, enter the fields as above and hit, "Update and View Results", I get:

Sorry, there were no Host OS matching your search criteria. Please refine your search and try again.

If I enter, "compatibility" in the field at the top of the page, and hit, "Search", I get 176 results.  There are 10 on the first page, 1 of which relates to the iPad, 5 to Dell PowerEdge devices, 1 to an NEC device, 1 to a Cisco device and two to things I'm not sure how to describe but which bear no obvious relation to OS X or VMware Fusion in any way.

If instead of hitting, "Search", I hit, "Update and View Results", with the fields as entered above, I once again get the same error message as quoted just above.

So: thus far, I've had no answers at all to the question I actually asked.  Is anyone capable of actually recognising that fact?

I'd contact VMware directly but this seems to be impossible unless you have a valid support contract.

ColoradoMarmot
Champion
Champion

"Is VMWare Fusion 4 expected to be compatible with Mavericks"

"No, Fusion 4 is two versions old"

That's a direct answer to your question.    Fusion 4 is designed for 10.7, and there have been major internal changes in 10.8 and 10.9 - and Fusion 4 isn't fully compatible with 10.8 either.  Fusion 4 is not expected to be compatible, because it's not remotely designed for it.  For the record, Fusion 5 is not expected to be compatible with 10.9 either (that's why they released Fusion 6!).

Now if you want to ask if it's possible to hack/kludge/fudge to get it running as long as your willing to put up with a complete lack of support, partial functionality, intermittent issues, instability and a risk of virtual machine corruption, that's a completely different question.     We did try with Fusion 5 (because it's what we had), and ran into both major and minor issues.  We gave up and started working with the technical preview for Fusion 6 because that's where VMWare was fixing the issues. 

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chuckufarley
Contributor
Contributor

For the record, Fusion 5 is not expected to be compatible with 10.9 either (that's why they released Fusion 6!).

That's a rather benevolent view—capitalisation would be a factor too, I'd wager.

Now if you want to ask if it's possible to hack/kludge/fudge to get it running as long as your willing to put up with a complete lack of support, partial functionality, intermittent issues, instability and a risk of virtual machine corruption, that's a completely different question.

Who in their right mind would want that?  You've got a strange opinion of someone you've never met.

We did try with Fusion 5 (because it's what we had), and ran into both major and minor issues.  We gave up and started working with the technical preview for Fusion 6 because that's where VMWare was fixing the issues.

Now, that's a helpful answer.  Moderately.

I'm going to unsubscribe from this thread and call it a bust.  It's not really going anywhere.  I'll just wait and see what happens when 10.9 is released.

By the way: two posts later, your original attempt at brevity must be seeming like a false economy.  Maybe there's a lesson to be learned there?

EDIT: after having read the answers here, I'm going to call shenanigans.  I'm beginning to believe WoodyZ and yourself may have a vested, undeclared interest.

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WoodyZ
Immortal
Immortal

chuckufarley wrote: EDIT: after having read the answers here, I'm going to call shenanigans.  I'm beginning to believe WoodyZ and yourself may have a vested, undeclared interest.

Really!?  And just what vested, undeclared interest does your mind imagine I have!?  I'm not going to waste any more of my time on this or do a point by point rebuttal to your last few posts and will simply say that the fact that you couldn't initially find and then when given the blatantly obvious and logical path to it, you couldn't even properly use the VMware Compatibility Guide and that tells me all I need to know!

Message was edited by: WoodyZ - Originally posted: Sep 24, 2013 9:05 AM

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JEstrada
Contributor
Contributor

I'm running VMWare Fusion 4 on my iMac with Mavericks GM.  I just finished installing a VM with CentOS 6.4 64-bit on it and it completed and rebooted without problems.  I was able to change the settings and seems to be working fine. 

The only thing I noticed is that when I selected Unity (over Single Window) the machine disappeared.  There may be a few caveats but you may explore further.

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diamondsw
Contributor
Contributor

The hostility here is impressive. Likewise I've been happily running VMware Fusion 4.1.3 on a 10.8.4 host with zero issues. Just because the vendor says "we don't support it" doesn't mean it magically stops working! There were no new features in 5 that interested me, and likewise there are no new features in 6 that I need. All I need is a working virtualization engine, and that part VMware largely perfected ages ago. I see no reason if the software still functions that I should need to pay an annual tithe to VMware. So the question is - does it still function?

If 10.9 breaks 4.x, I'll accept that - it happens sometimes. However, even more often software keeps on working year after year through OS upgrades without having to be purchased over and over. Yes, even virtualization software. Parallels has been kind enough to verify point-blank that it does not function, whereas all we get here is "officially not supported", which is utterly meaningless. We're not asking for technical support, we're asking about functionality. This is a rather basic distinction that WoodyZ and others have been bending over backwards to avoid.

So, like the original poster, I'd like to know more about experiences with 4.x on 10.9. Thank you, JEstrada for finally answering the original post. As I don't use Unity, that particular bug won't impact me. Another thread mentioned the menu bar may not disappear properly in full-screen view - that's more of an issue for my setup. I suppose I'll find out later this week, but not thanks to most of the nasty folks on this forum.

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koi
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

The sense of entitlement here is impressive. Smiley Happy

But seriously, when people talk about "compatability", I (and I suspect most others) interpret this to be "vendor supported"; dlhotka and WoodyZ have answered this. You and the OP seem to be interested in "does it work", which is only something that considerable testing would be able to conclusively answer, but it's not clear who would do this testing.

As Fusion 4 is not officially supported, the only answers that can possibly be in this thread are anecdotes so the OP's demand for sources is ludicrous. Rudely rejecting responses as being incomplete or not official enough (when they're likely the best answers people have), getting angry because people answered the question as posed and not the question the OP wanted answered, and namecalling makes the OP come across as spoiled and ungrateful. Even so, I don't think other's responses have been, as you say, nasty.

diamondsw
Contributor
Contributor

Fair enough, but these are community forums. In such a place I'm not looking for a VMware representative to come in and comment - their position is abundantly clear. But to have other users retreat behind the same thing, and vehemently so - well that's rather frustrating.

Meanwhile, until the last post before mine we had lots of "it's not supported, it won't work" without anyone specifying what issues they'd run into. They certainly haven't said much as to what they experienced, which is kind of the whole point of the thread.

Reply 1: No useful information, brusque.

Reply 3: Reasonably complete statements of support status. Useful, but not was being asked.

Reply 6: This is where it starts turning sour, insulting the poster's ability to find info on the VMware site. (Quite frankly, the VMware site is a maze - it's poorly laid out and takes far more clicking and searching than it has any right to.)

Reply 7: Getting frustrated. It's not appropriate to treat official support status as "opinions", but this does get to the heart of the matter - support and compatibility are not the same, and what he's interested in is compatibility, not support. One would think from this point the thread would focus.

Reply 8. But... no. It's now been made explicitly clear that he's not looking for support status, but that's all that's thrown back. That and an insinuation that he doesn't care about stability. This is the point that really tears it for me.

All he (and I) want is to find out what issues we should expect. Things like: Are there driver issues? VMware Tools integration problems? Unity/Fullscreen problems? Virtualization engine problems? None of this has anything to do with support status, and none of it has anything to do with "hack/kludge/fudge" or not caring about stability. Obviously if there's any risk to actual VM stability and core functionality, then that's exactly what we want to know. However, not only is there no evidence whatsoever of that, past history of using older copies of Fusion past their "expiration dates" supports the idea quite strongly that there's a good chance it will work just fine for some time. Sometimes that's not the case and a new OS version does indeed introduce fundamental enough changes that the old version ceases working properly.

We did try with Fusion 5 (because it's what we had), and ran into both major and minor issues

...such as? You know, describing those would actually be on topic and helpful.

Reply 9/10: And then a few parting shots on both sides. At this point I have little good to say about anyone in the thread, including the OP.

Reply 11: First time someone has actually replied with "yes, I've tried it, and here's what I saw". THANK YOU.

I won't comment on my own posts; you can take them as you will. But this was a very unproductive and nasty thread, and we got precious little useful information out of it. Information that at the very least the original poster and I needed. I suppose I'll find out tomorrow(ish).

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koi
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

As of this writing, Mavericks still doesn't even have a release date, much less be in the hands of many people who can test. You and the OP are interested in an old version of Fusion. VMware has given their position of not officially supported. Others with prerelease seeds (i.e. developers) probably have better things to do than test another companies product (i.e. develop their own), much less another companies product that's two versions old -- they're much more likely to be running the current version.

So yes, JEstrada's post is the most useful. Yes, VMware's site navigation and layout suck. Yes, other posters could have been more tactful or patient or whatever. But to me, the overriding thing is that the thread starts out with an unrealistic expectation, IMHO gets answered as such, and quickly degenerates. I'd agree with your position more if Mavericks were available and people were intentionally being obtuse, but I just don't think that's the case.

Hopefully when Mavericks is out people can provide better anecdotes about it and Fusion 4.

Message was edited by: koi: Correct typo

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brockap3
Contributor
Contributor

Too bad you wrote that post so early in the morning yesterday. I am currently running OSX Mavericks (as released and downloaded yesterday afternoon) with VMWare Fusion 4.1.4 running Win7x64. Hopefully this puts an end to the bitterness distastefully shown in this discussion. So, whoever it was, "not supported" does not mean "incompatible," you will merely not get help with your problems. But wait, if you still have VMWare 4 you wouldn't get support anyway... Now, all "features" have not been tested, but it is running just fine.

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7Tigers
Contributor
Contributor

I'm still evaluating it, but Mavericks will run in Fusion 4, just upgrade your 10.8 installation, that's what worked for me.

I was hoping I could boot from the disk image file, but alas, that method is not supported by 10.9 in this version.

Screen Shot 2013-10-23 at 10.38.08 AM.png

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wjboynton
Contributor
Contributor

I just installed 10.9 Mavericks. VMWare Fusion 4.1.4 appears to be running fine. I ran Excel, Word, and IE just fine with no problems noted. However this was limited testing, so maybe there are problems yet to be discovered. I also printed to a WIFI printer without issue. I ran the test on the kids' fairly new MacBook Pro.

I will now perform the 10.9 upgrade on my computer, a fairly old MacAir (2-3yrs). I figure the worst than will happen is I will find issues that I cannot live with and then I will simple buy the VMWare 6 upgrade.

Best of luck.

PS, I don't see a problem with the help that has been posted here or the general grumpiness in the dialog… In my experience, upgrades and having to spend money for them are usually a sore subject.

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wila
Immortal
Immortal

OK.. technically replying to OP, but that's only because I have to reply to somebody (nature of the beast)

This is a reply to every participant of this thread who decided to address the other persons reply or even the person behind the answer.

So everybody who got personal in this thread.

Stop talking about people or their replies or your so called beliefs about their motivations and keep the discussion ON TOPIC.

This is a public forum where your peers are trying to help answering on a friendly and free bases.

If anybody here start whining again I will lock this thread and you can start a new one if you want to know more about the ins and outs of a retired product and one that wasn't even public at the time of starting of this thread.

Sorry for putting it out so bluntly, but some of the replies in here are making my stomach hurt.

--

Wil

| Author of Vimalin. The virtual machine Backup app for VMware Fusion, VMware Workstation and Player |
| More info at vimalin.com | Twitter @wilva
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