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Windows Vista 32-bit Host machine installing Vista 64-bit as a Guest OS:
When selecting 64-bit Vista from the pull down menu when creating a new virtual machine, a caution sign with the text 64-bit guest operating systems are not supported by this host and will not run is displayed, however, it is easy to miss and can continue on to create the vm (until the virtual machine is started and it reads the DVD). It attempts to load the files but again, the Windows boot manager window appears and provides the same message as indicated above.

In Full Screen mode with a Mac OS host machine, it's not possible to open the spotlight search.

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Wiki MarkupWhen in full screen view, and I move the cursor to the top of the window, I can't open spotlight but can open other things such as the clock and any other shortcut icons I have open in the menu bar.  Neither method works to get into the spotlight search bar \[clicking on the icon or Command-Space\].   I tried using the Control-Command option to 'exit' out of the VMWare window and return to the Mac side and I still can't open spotlight via clicking on the icon or using Command-Space.  If I  switch to a different window it works again.  It doesn't necessarily need to be a VMWare window as shown \[I can use expose to switch windows or use a window on my external monitor and it'll work\].   The problem only occurs in full screen view.If you have over-allocated your disk (told VM ware to make images that, if they all grew to their full size would take up more disk space than you have free) VMware may pop up an alert warning you when you're about to use up more space than you have.  That would give you a chance to free up disk space or exit cleanly.  We don't recommend you over-allocate your disk space. There's no guarantee of a warning before bad things happen.  It could end poorly in data loss or corruption.

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VMware Fusion will crash without giving an error message on a MacBook Air when a CD/DVD drive is "Connected" and set to "Automatically detect physical CD/DVD drive." To resolve this, select the virtual machine from the Virtual Machine Library and press Settings. Then, select CD/DVD under Removable Devices, make sure Connected is un-checked and click OK.

There have been problems reported using the student installer of Windows XP.

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\[alexp, Athena VM\] If a .vmss (VMware suspended state) file is around when you launch a VM, networking can be irreparably broken even if the VM had previously been halted. The only fix seems to be to remove the .vmss file from the VM directory.

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\[alexp, Athena VM\] I've had problems running the VPN in the host OS. Running it in the guest seems to work for me.

Time sync is wonky with VMs. ADDR This should be explored further and documented.  Early reports are that it can get out of sync by significant amounts (hours) fairly quickly. \[alexp, Athena VM\] This has been seen to happen at times even if the VMware Tools time synchronization option is enabled. On Athena virtual machines, this kills Kerberos and AFS since these depend sensitively on time.

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\[alexp, Athena VM\] Leaving a VM suspended for about 5 days and subsequently resuming results in broken network and AFS. Restarting these as root did not fix them. It was necessary to reboot the VM. Athena 9.4.43 VMs can't be updated to latest release due to rpm conflict between WMware Tools in the VM and VMware Player in the Athena release (introduced after 9.4.43).

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vpnc works well as vpn within an Athena VM. To restore zephyr functionality on VM restart, you will likely need to run:

zctl load

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\[alexp, Athena VM\] PXE install issues on Windows (XP, Vista) host machines for Athena VMs:

Both on my laptop and on another machine running
Vista, I kept running into a situation where the PXE installer would
attempt to connect but spin forever, or sometimes connect and begin
the install, but then hang shortly after. There were no obvious clues,
error messages or useful logs. Finally I took my machine up to the
demo center and tried there, and everything ran fine, so it must have
been some network problem. What made this really nasty was that:

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The other odd thing I noticed is that when I tried copying working,
powered off VMs from other machines to the laptop (telling VMware it
was "moved" or "copied"- I tried both), changing the IP address to
something appropriate, the networking in the guest was broken no
matter what I tried- this was on the same subnet where I had the
problem. Yet after I was able to do the PXE install upstairs, the
PXE-installed VM worked fine on the "problem" subnet.VMware Fusion Virtual Machines are automatically excluded from Time Machine backups.  This appears to be in response to an apple bug in 10.5 that may have been resolved in 10.5.2, though there is no formal word from VMware.See http://communities.vmware.com/message/882448#882448 for more info.

If you rename a virtual machine, you will be presented with this warning that next time it is started:

Image Removed
Select I moved it

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Choosing Take Ownership does nothing but pop up the alert again.
You must choose Cancel and hand-delete the lock file directory from your copy.

VMware Fusion Known Issues

• Time Machine, Mac OS X 10.5's built-in backup solution, will duplicate any virtual machine that has been run since the last backup.  As virtual machines tend to be large, they might take up a considerable amount of space on your backup drive.  For more information see the release announcement from the Fusion Blog.
• Full screen mode interfers with opening the spotlight search dialog and Spaces.  These bugs have been reported to Apple.
• For additional known issues, see the VMware Fusion Release Notes.