I searched the VMWare site for a place to post this but it appears my 30 days of complimentary support have expired and they believe I should purchase the right to send them an email.  ha!  I’ve purchased 4 copies of VMWare Fusion, blogged about using VMWare when developing on Vista and XP using a Mac, and generally been a big proponent for the Software.  I think I’ve earned my right to send an email.  Furthermore, I am spending my time preparing a very solid bit of feedback (while their software messes with my day), I might as well share with the world so all can discuss and understand the need.

Hard Drive Hiccups Kill VMWare Guest

Here’s the deal…  When I am working with my VM Vista, and the Hard Drive disconnects from my Mac, the VM Guest (Vista) is killed dead (as if I’d pulled the power cord on the cpu).  That’s not all!  VMWare then spins and sputters and is unable to close, quit or even restart.  Unusual for a Mac, you cannot get the VM back online without a restart.  Yeah, I said it, you have to reboot the Mac.

Please Handle Expected Failures

“Don’t unplug the hard drive,” you might say?  That certainly is the logical answer, isn’t it?  Well, this is the second time today that I am struggling with VMWare, trying to make it let go of whatever it is trying to do so I can start over.  In both case, I lost connection to my harddrive as my phone passed the external harddrive resting on the arm of my chair.  No idea why it disconnected, be it a bump or some magnetic interference, but it did, twice.  Even though I make it a policy never to disconnect without first shutting down VMWare, I experience this sort of thing at least once per week.  I use VMWare all day, every day, so I suppose I see more of these kinds of things then most.

Shut Down Reliably

First I’d like to see this sort of interuption dealt with.  It seems reasonable to freeze the VM in memory and present a dialog that states, “your VMImage file has been disconnected, please reconnect and click OK or choose KILL to shut down and loose all unsaved information”.  That seems like something that should be possible.

Second, when VMWare shuts down, I can’t get my hard drive to eject without quitting VMWare and then waiting a very long time.  I assume VMWare is still saving something but tell me so!  Leave a dialog up.  yo

thanks

This entry was posted on Monday, November 10th, 2008 at 2:29 pm and is filed under VMWare. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.