OS and Software > All Things Macintosh > Fusion VMs constantly hosed

Fusion VMs constantly hosed

Never had this issue and I've been using Fusion quite a bit over the past few months.

Any chance your RAM or HD is going bad? Maybe try memtest in single user mode: »osxdaily.com/2011/05/03/memtest-···am-test/
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University of Southern California - Fight On!

I have no other problems with this Mac mini at all and the app never crashes, no kernel panics; it's really been a flawless machine. I also never had issues when I ran Parallels 7 on it. I switched to Fusion for better DOS printing support.

Sounds like you may need to take this up with Fusion. Unless the system is caching something and corrupting it that way, it's hard to say what could be going on. However, since you have no issues with these VMs being reliable in Parallels, all signs point to it being a Fusion thing.

BTW, Parallels 8 is pretty nice.

Parallels 8 (along with 7, 6, 5, and 4) always prints out of margin on certain DOS apps (cutting off the left side of the page). And no matter how I mess with the printer settings it still does it. Was able to fix the printer problem by moving to Fusion but now I have this corruption problem.

reply to skeechan
I've been using Fusion since v1.0 and have installed it at dozens and dozens of clients and never seen a consistent issue like you are. I've seen VM's get corrupted when a few different things happen:

1) Computer suddenly shuts off while VM is running, especially with laptops and bad batteries.
2) Hardware issues on computer, failing hard drive or bad ram.
3) Filesystem corruption.

reply to rugby
Thing is my manual snapshots always fix it so it isn't uberhosed, just borked up somehow but all the time somehow as in at least 3 or 4 times a week.

reply to skeechan
What can you possibly still be using from the DOS days that requires that much printing? Sheesh. Anyway, I haven't messed with printing much in it, but have you tried DOSBOX from within OSX as opposed to running these apps from within Fusion.

As for your problem, are you running an SSD or something else that Fusion doesn't like.

DOS works, QB requires very little code time to write simple apps. DOSBOX offers no comprehensive support compared to Windows. A shell in Win32 works great and works with anything the Win32 can authenticate with (any mapped drive). The setup I use works with the exception of Fusion hosing my VMs which is a minor annoyance since I take manual snapshots. It wouldn't bother me at all if the "auto" snapshots actually worked. It's set to take auto snapshots but they NEVER are able to repair the VM.

reply to skeechan
Seems it is far more frequent when I shut down. It has happened a few more times and only after I had shut down rather than suspended Windows.

Have you tried running Disk Utility to check the disk and running Memtest or something similar to check uour RAM?

Yep, no problems at all. I'm running a LVG now, but even when only running off the SSD along I had the problem with Fusion. With Parallels I only had this type of problem if the machine kernel panicked or some other major system fault while the VM was running but this happens after normal shut down of Windows, like the VM isn't saving some configuration setting or something.

The right thing to do would be to take the time and report this to Fusion and work with them to figure out if it's just your hardware causing the issues or if there's a problem with the code in their app which only rears its ugly head in certain hardware/software configs such as your own and needs fixing. That would what I would do... Help everyone out in the long run.

reply to skeechan
Really weird problem.

VM from Boot Camp or not?

Running same VM in both Fusion 4 and 5? Did you upgrade the VM to Fusion 5 or each time you start VM in Fusion 5 do you get warned that not all features are available until you upgrade the VM?

Not a BC VM but it is a Parallels convert. First ran in Fusion 4, I did upgrade to 5 and let it do its thing knowing I wasn't going back to 4.

Installed in this VM is Visual Basic 6, Office 2010 and AutoCAD LT 2010.

Wait a minute. Are you telling us that all this time you've not once rebuilt this VM natively on Fusion to see if it fixes the problem? You've been having corruption issues and all the time it's been a VM that's changed virtualization platforms without a rebuild?

There is no problem with the image as reported by the vdisk manager and I have followed the troubleshooting steps for verifying the integrity of the parent image files and as far as I see there is no "rebuild" in Fusion like there is in WS. All of the necessary image components are there and function.

While the image isn't native Fusion, permanent conversion of a Parallels image is a long supported feature of Fusion and an automated process.

I'm not talking about "rebuild" as a function of the VM tools. I'm talking in terms of recreating the VM. When you switch VM'ing platforms it's ALWAYS a good idea to redo your VM, just in case the previous platform's drivers and tools subsystem crapped it out. Sure, it's supposed to work without issues to convert stuff over from one platform to another, but that's not what always happens. Do yourself a favor and just build a new VM (reload the OS, apps, etc.) as a test. If you want, just build a new VM with at least the OS reloaded on it and run it as a test for a few days and see if it corrupts. If it doesn't, then it's the VM. If it does, then it's hardware or Fusion related... something unique that you've stumbled across.

What have you got to lose at this point? You're not solving your issues now. This is the one thing you haven't done yet... something that should have been obvious to try from the get go. The one thing that you haven't ever changed is your VM (be it the snapshots or the original VM state). That's what you need to change as your next test. Rebuild it from the OS level up and see if it's stable for longer than your current borked VM is/stays before it corrupts.

Ah, I was too lazy to "start over" with installing Winderz, having to call India to get activated, then call India again to get Office activated, fight with AutoDesk with getting ACAD activated (this take days as you have to email receipts and everything, it sucks). The VM, once running does so without any issues at all.

The weird thing is that auto-protect snapshots don't work for fixing the borked VM while the manual ones do. I don't know what the difference could possibly be between a manual and auto-protect snapshot unless the VM is getting borked while it is running, but there is no problem with the VM while it is running and when suspended or shutdown, does so without any issues at all. You simply come back and try and reopen it and it says the VM is borked (some vmdk file which checks good in vdiskmanager) and there are no snapshots to repair it. And then I can simply open the snapshots window, pick the snap before the autosave and it fixes it in about 7 seconds. And it isn't the SSD since it has been swapped for a new one.

Before conversion I followed the instructions to remove the old drivers and Parallels tools and had the VM is a good neutral state. Then VMware's converter tool converts the image and once booted Fusion proceeds installs its own drivers. No problems at all, nothing weird, no devices missing...nada. And since, it has updated those drivers many times as VMWare pushes Fusion updates, including upgrading from ver 4 to ver 5.

I guess the next step is to start over as you say, it's just a PITA, especially now during the holiday when AutoDesk is no where to be found.