Yosemite, Fusion 7, Windows 10, Office 365: experience

I am a bit freaked out about how painless this was. The experience was surreal to someone of my vintage.

My primary machine is a 10 month old MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM, 1.6GHz i5 and a 256GB internal SSD running Yosemite. A Thunderbolt 2 Hub connects an USB 3 external 1TB SSD and an old Firewire 800 3TB external drive and separate 3TB backup cradle. All pretty generic stuff.

For work reasons I bought Office 365 Mac. I thought I might be able to avoid Windows entirely, but a new contract meant I couldn’t escape.

So I installed my Fusion VM 7.x and an old XP image with Office 2007. The image is stored on my external SSD. That went disturbingly well, so I downloaded the Windows 10 ISO (64 bit) and asked Fusion to create a new image from the ISO. That also went disturbingly well. The only glitch was it hung during VMWare Tools installation. I had to restart the VM and I reinstalled the tools.

Then, hey, what the hell, I installed Office 365 too. The usual 365 license covers several machines, both Windows and Mac. Yeah, same thing. No problem.

The image on the external SSD took 12.6GB with just Windows 10 Pro, 14.45 after Office 365 installed. Heck, I’ll probably move it back to my primary SSD.

The performance of my very generic low end MacBook Air is excellent. Modern SSDs are a miracle.

Very. Strange.

VMWare Fusion 5: faster with a single file than with 2GB files?

I've been girding my primary machine for the Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion conversion for about a year. Yes, before ML was released.

Have I mentioned that I hate OS updates?

The good news is that I'm starting to like Mountain Lion on my MacBook Air. I like it enough I'm even considering replacing my main machine's problematic Magic Mouse with a Magic Pad after the conversion. So now I'm closing in on the last steps, including update my historically sluggish VMWare 3 XP image. Today I downloaded a trial version of VMWare 5; annoyingly the download is 5.0 and the first step is to upgrade to 5.01.

During the installation VMWare 5.0 offered to free up disk space; my Win XP VM had again swollen to 120GB [1]. After clean up and conversion it turned into a single 50GB file. This surprised me; I'd previously used 2GB stripes because I hoped Time Machine backup would be less affected. I suspect VMWare strongly prefers the single file model. I also took this upgrade opportunity to tell the VM to use two cores, and I shrank the XP memory allocation to the recommended 512MB [2] and set Windows internal memory management to system controlled (default).

 Probably thanks to the single file, but maybe due to the second core, the XP instance feels much quicker. In particular I'm hearing much less background disk access.

I'll stay with the single file for now, and I'll exclude it from my Time Machine backup. It will be copied by my nightly disk mirror and I'll keep an instance on another local drive.

[1] I shrank it in over a year ago, and use it very infrequently, so this large growth suggests a bug somewhere - VMWare, Windows XP, something about my setup. I'll have to keep an eye on it. I suspect at some point I might want to start over with a fresh XP image, but that's a painful thought. It's probably easier to just shrink the image periodically. In retrospect, I don't recommend converting an existing Windows system into a VMWare image.
[2] I could easily give it 2GB, but I suspect there's a reason VMWare recommends this modest allocation.

See also:

• Speeding up my sluggish XP Fusion VM
• Shrinking a pre-allocated Mac VMWare Fusion virtual machine image
• VMWare Fusion 3: Migration, PowerPoint and Shrink Disk (my initial VMWare 3 impressions)
• VMware Virtual Machines - the backup problem; Windows, not Mac, but suggests that backup/restore of the multi-file VM model can be problematic.
• How to fix permissions in an OS X Package and how deal with VMWare Fusion Insufficient Permission problems

Notes on converting a MacBook Core 2 Duo dual USB to Lion

Our vintage 2006 MacBook Core 2 Duo can, in theory, run Lion [1]. I just upgraded it from Snow Leopard, which it ran reasonably well albeit with lots of fan activity.

I didn't upgrade happily. There's a reason I've waited this long. I wanted to stay with Snow Leopard, but Apple's MobileMe migration was going to cause problem for Emily's Address Book/iPhone Contact sync. Yes, that was the primary reason. Sad.

I upgraded all the apps we use, said farewell to AppleWorks and many games the kids no longer use, removed all PreferencePanes and extensions, unplugged all cables, did a safeboot cleanup and two completely independent backups (one a clone). Then I upgraded.

It seemed to go well enough once Spotlight rebuilt its indices and I refreshed everyone's account. it does take a very long time to log out; Lion is saving a lot of state information and the MacBook doesn't like that.

It went well enough, that is, until my old account. Then things got slow. Even though I'd updated VMWare Fusion to the final "Lion Compatible" 3.x version, I suspected it was the problem. I tried running my VM -- that was a disaster. After power down and a safe boot I uninstalled VMWare 3 per directions.

That helped a great deal. In fact, the laptop is quieter than it used to be. I suspect Fusion has been causing problems for a while [3].

So will I try Fusion 4?

No, not on this old machine. I really don't use my VM's very often, and neither Parallels nor Fusion are sold through the App Store. To do their magic without Apple's help they must be hacking the underlying OS; and OS X is increasingly hard to safely hack.

For now the MacBook seems to have survived Lion - albeit at the cost of a little used VM I'm probably better off without and a dozen or so older games -- and AppleWorks.

So far, better than it could have been. I am, however, regretting obeying Lion's command to update my Airport firmware [2]. 

[1] That's almost six years ago! I'd forgotten how old it really was. Maybe I shouldn't be too upset it can't run Mountain Lion. [2] Lion really wanted me to undo my Time Capsule firmware regression, so I did. Now I'm seeing more problems with losing connectivity, i saw a -1 error again, and I'm again having to rebuild Spotlight indices of the backups. I have a strong feeling I'll be reverting again. I seem to be the only one with this problem though. [3] My best Fusion experience was version 2 with a Windows 2000 VM -- on that old MacBook probably with Leopard (10.5). It's never worked as well since. 

Update 6/17/2012: Logging out and user switching is much slower. It takes about 20-30 seconds to log out and 15-20 to switch. I think it's because of all the context saving Lion does; this old machine can't handle it. There are ways to disable saving of application states, but I'm going to wait a while on this one. Otherwise things aren't too bad. The machine is quieter than it has been for years, the fan no longer roars. I suspect that's due to uninstalling Fusion 3.x, but it could be a Lion improvement.

Update 6/17/2012: I went through each user account and turned off 'save and restore windows' in system preferences. Then I logged out and unchecked the restore windows on login option shown there. No logout and login is back to Snow Leopard times. Now I have to figure out what to do about #$@$ Google Software Update. it keeps popping up in managed accounts that don't have privileges to run it.

Shrinking a pre-allocated Mac VMWare Fusion virtual machine image

My "pre-allocated" VMWare image was taking up 120 GB on my drive for about 40GB of data. I found many references on how to shrink these images (.vmdsk), but they were largely obsolete and misleading. It takes a while, and the steps are weird, but it's fully supported by VMWare 3.

At a high level, here are the steps. Alas, I'm short of time so no details.

1. Close down the guest OS.
2. Using VMWare settings for 'hard drive' you can change the image from pre-allocated to the default. This takes hours but it works.
3. Open the guest OS and run XP defrag.
4. In the guest OS update VMWare tools.
5. In the guest OS Run VMWare tools "shrink". Takes hours.
6. In the guest OS Defrag again as a nice-to-do.
7. Shut down and restart to make it all nice and clean.

My image now consumes about 45 GB of drive space. It's not pre-allocated, so it will get host OS fragmented as it grows but I can live with that.

Speeding up my sluggish XP Fusion VM

When I gave up my last XP machine, I created a VM from the disk image. It worked, but the performance was poor. My XP VM on an i5 iMac was quite a bit slower than a Windows 2000 VM on my much less powerful MacBook.

It took me a while to speed things up. I removed some custom settings for the Windows swap file and I gave the VM more cores. I upgraded my system memory that helped too; I gave the VM more RAM.

Even so, I could hear much more disk activity than I liked and file saves were often slow. I don't use the VM for much, so I took my time on fixing this.

More recently, I got some help from VMware KB: Troubleshooting Fusion virtual machine performance for disk issues.

I found the VM had inherited 35% fragmentation from the old disk (I'd also made it too large). I used XP's built in defrag to fix that. Then I ran VMWare Fusion's cleanup utility, and I flipped my VM from 2GB files to a single large file.

It's fine now; as fast as I need it to be (not much!).

VMware Virtual Machines - the backup problem

It's times like this that I really miss Byte (or BYTE?) magazine. They would have had great coverage of VMWare VMs - how they work, and what the risks are. Now that's specialist knowledge. Knowledge that, when I use Google, is obscured by a haze of marketing material.

The best we non-specialists can do is share our limited experience in blog posts, like this one sharing my experience with VM backup. That's been a problem for me.

First - my experience. I've used VMWare Fusion on my Macs for a few years. I need it less than once a month, typically to launch XPSP4 and run Access or (yech) Quicken. On the other hand, I configured and use a VMWare Workstation on a 64bit Win7 machine at work. That VM is running a Windows 2003 Server environment with terminal server and I use it very frequently.

Both my Fusion and Workstation VMs are configured to store the VM data as many files rather than a single monolithic file. Both are about 80-100 GB in size and store as little of my data as possible; on the Mac the individual .vmdk files vary in size from about 200 to 500 MB. I don't have the Workstation VM at hand but I think its files are all a fixed size.

The host OS X machine is backed up using Time Capsule (sigh) and SuperDuper! (sigh). Neither give me the warm fuzzies of Retrospect at its best. The Windows 7 machine is backed up using (Dantz -> EMC -> Roxio) Retrospect Professional.

I configured both VMs to use multiple files because of the VM backup problem I knew about.

The obvious backup problem for these machines is that if you configure a VM as one monolithic file, then every time you touch it the host system backup software has to backup a 100GB backup event. That will overload Time Machine (Capsule) or Retrospect pretty quickly. (More sophisticated backup software can manage this differently, but I don't think TM or Retrospect can.)

That's why I went with separate files. Backups would only have to manage the files that changed. (Ahh, but how does the backup software know what's changed - esp. if the files are a fixed size?)

I think that approach does work when the VM is shut down. I think it works on my Mac. It doesn't work with Retrospect Professional on the Windows 7 machine where our VM is always running.

I learned that the hard way when we tried to do a restore. The restored VM seemed good at first, but it was soon clear that we'd somehow ended up with different time slices. We had to kill the VM. Fortunately, because I'm justifiably paranoid about backup, we also had a file system backup that was only a few weeks old. Since we don't keep data on the VM we lost very little.

This is a nasty problem. As best I can tell, at least on Windows, Retrospect Professional can't do a reliable backup of a running multi-file VMWare VM. The limited VMWare marketing material I could find suggests this isn't just a Retrospect problem. The solution is, of course, to buy their costly backup software. You can also do backup from within the client OS, but that adds a new level of cost and complexity to overall backup. Retrospect Professional, for example, won't install on Windows 2003 server. For that you need their much more costly server backup.

Now you know what I know. If you know any more, or can point me to anything that's not marketing material, I'd be grateful.

I do miss Byte.

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Retrospect Professional 8 backup of VMware VM corrupt on restore

I've been using Retrospect Professional 8 to backup a Windows 7 machine. That machine has VMware VM running.

There have been no backup errors.

Recently I had to do a restore of the VM. All seemed fine. The size was right. When I ran it, however, the VM was corrupt.

The VM is made up of many large files. I think Retrospect backed some up at different times, depending on metadata changes, file locked, etc. Normally that would be fine, but they all had to be the same version for the VM to work.

Fortunately I had a completely separate manual all-at-once backup done when VMWare was turned off. It was a few days old, but we didn't lose anything significant. Sometimes paranoia is a good strategy.

A cautionary tale! Virtual machine backup is tricky.

Access denied: VMWare Shared Folders on Windows 7

Between Dell machines shipping with motherboard disconnected SATA cables, a Clampi Trojan on my Windows 2003 server, a mysteriously vanished backup [1], Windows 2003 blue screening on a new Dell workstation, a failed Acronis disk image and the horror of 64 bit Windows 7 it's been another fun week in tech.

Today was a bit better. I installed VMWare Player on a 64bit Windows machine and created a 32 bit Windows 2003 VM - giving it all four cores and 3GB of memory. After VMWare tools installed and I enabled hardware graphics acceleration it felt faster than on the prior 3 yo workstation lost to the wretched corporate refresh cycle.

Mostly easy, until I dealt with the second drive in the box. Even after I used shared folders to map to drive E:, and the ancient DOS subst command to assign a drive letter to the shared folder, I still couldn't write to the new shared folder. I could read, but I couldn't delete anything. If I tried, I got an "access denied" message.

Worse, it seemed I could write to the drive, but the data wasn't there. VMWare showed files as having been copied, but in Win 7 they weren't there. On restart the VM didn't see them either.

The fix was to right click the drive letter in Windows 7, choose properties then security, and allow "EVERYONE" full control of the E: Drive. Then Windows 2003 in the VM could read and write.

I suspect there's a less severe fix. After I left work it occurred to me that I should study the read/write permissions on the C: drive. I suspect the vmware_user (__vmware_user__) group has special privileges on that drive, I just need to study them and replicate them for the E: and F: drives.

I'll update this post with what I find.

PS. It's unnerving that my Google searches really didn't turn up anything useful on this topic!

[1] Retrospect Pro backup on external drive. It vanished! Dir *.* and Attrib *.* showed nothing with 325 GB used. Retrospect could find the files though -- it restored from the backup drive.

--
My Google Reader Shared items (feed)

VMWare Fusion 3: Migration, PowerPoint and Shrink Disk

I've used VMWare 2 with Windows 2000 and Office 2003 on my MacBook for almost a year. I hardly ever use it, but it's compact and fast.

I wasn't sure I'd bother installing VMWare on my i5 iMac, but then I discovered how lousy PowerPoint 2008 really is (an especially bitter discovery since my first impressions were very positive).

So I downloaded the 30 day trial version of VMWare 3, installed VMWare Converter on my creaky XP box, and created an XP image on my iMac including Office 2003. I'm pleased to report that PowerPoint 2003/Win in the Fusion VM is at least ten times faster than PowerPoint 2008 for OS X.

Here are some discoveries of note:

• VMWare on the iMac had trouble connecting to VMWare Converter. I had to restart the XP box to make it work. I think a pending install created a problem.
• The conversion took an hour or two.
• On VM startup it looked at first that only one account had been created -- the XP box had had 3 accounts. I restarted the VM and it showed all 3.
• I couldn't get VMWare Tools to install. I had to login and connect to the share then run setup. This took a couple of tries I think, and a restart or two. It wasn't as smooth as VMWare 2, but my previous efforts didn't involve migration.
• I had to re-authenticate the VM XP box with Microsoft. That took a few minutes. I'm still running the old box so I unplug the network cable when the VM is running. I'll be putting the old box out to pasture soon. (It's amazing how silent the office is when only the iMac is running.)
• The VM migration created about 50 2.5 GB files in an OS X Package (executable folder). This can be changed in settings. It's done to get around FAT max file sizes; I wonder if it might help with backup. (If you create a 100GB single file VM, each time you open it you'll create a 100GB file that needs backup.)
• I didn't remember than I had two drives in the XP box. The VM had both drives; one held an old redundant backup. I deleted that drive (Settings:Hard Disks) but the VM didn't shrink. I used the "Clean Up Disk" function and that shrank it to a nice 50GB.

See also:

• Experiment with VMWare -- for free
• Parallels to VMware - my experience (Win2K install)
• VMware academic discounts: Fusion and Windows Workstation
• Why I'm downloading Windows 7 RC tonight ... (It runs on my MacBook)
• VMWare Converter - turn your XP box into a VM platform
• How to fix permissions in an OS X Package and how deal with VMWare Fusion Insufficient Permission problems

Update 3/11/2010: It's been performing excruciatingly slowly. I haven't been able to find any explanation. Startup times of about 3-5 minutes, intermittent very slow operations. It behaves like it has no working memory.

Update 10/26/10: I finally get around to speeding it up.

How to fix permissions in an OS X Package and how deal with VMWare Fusion Insufficient Permission problems

In this one post I shall now solve two mysteries not currently addressed anywhere Google can find.

The first mystery is how, in Snow Leopard (10.6), to change the permissions for all the files in a Package. (Have I mentioned how much I hate the OS X/Unix permissions model?).

It's easy to change the permissions on a Package (a folder that appears in OS X to be an application), but that doesn't change the internal permissions. Unlike a folder, there's no GUI option to apply the changes to "enclosed items".

The answer is to right click on the package and choose "Show Package Contents". Inside the package, create a folder. Move everything into the folder. Apply your permissions change to "enclosed items". Move everything out and delete the folder. (Of course you should backup first.)

The second mystery is how to move an OS X VMWare image between users. In VMWare 3 this is a a Package, and every file in it has the original owner's permissions. Moving it to a the "Shared" folder doesn't change permissions - because the OS X permissions model is irretrievably broken.

Changing permissions on the Package is not enough, VMWare will report that the package cannot be opened: "Error while opening the virtual machine: Insufficient permissions to access the file ..." (The actual error message will reference on specific file in the package.)

I changed Permissions on the Package, then I used the above trick to change permissions on all the files in the Package.

That worked.

Why I'm downloading Windows 7 RC tonight ...

It works on VMWare -- and it's free ...

VMware: Team Fusion: Windows 7 on Mac with VMware Fusion: A Practical Guide Revisited

... More important, I am excited that the Windows 7 Release Candidate is the easiest way for you to try out Windows on your Mac for FREE (at least until the beta expires). That’s right, you can download Windows 7 Release Candidate through July 1^st and it’s free to use until it expires on June 1, 2010...

The VMWare post has more details, but basically the RC works fine with some trivial and standard configuration options.

A very nice surprise for me. I've been tracking Windows 7 from a distance, but primarily as my way to avoid Vista (Windows 7 is Vista 2.0 of course, but I'm good with that). In the meantime I've had Parallels 1.x and Windows 2000 (!) running on my MacBook for about 2 years (man, does Win2K ever boot fast on that machine.) This setup worked for the handful of times I've needed it, and the two take up very little CPU or disk space. Windows 2000, of course, is essentially immune to modern viruses.

That's a good setup and it cost me nothing but Parallels 1.x since I have several unused Win2K licenses. It probably won't work on 10.6 though, and I'm about due for a new iMac.

So I'll put my unused VMWare license on the new machine, install Windows 7 RC, and be good for a year or so. Then I can decide if I want to buy Win 7 or regress to Win2K ...

(I wonder if I need to get more than one copy of Win 7 RC, in case I put it on two Macs ...)

5/26/09: Updated to remove a stupid mistake where I confused 2009 with 2010. The RC1 download is good for one year. That's just fine.

VMWare Converter - turn your XP box into a VM platform

I love the competition between Parallels and VMWare. I very much hope they both thrive ...

MacInTouch: timely news and tips about Apple Macintosh, iTunes, iPhone and more...

... Along with last week's release of Fusion 2.0.2, VMware has released VMware Converter 4.0, a free standalone program that can create a VMware virtual machine from a physical Linux or Windows machine and can convert VMware virtual machines between platforms. This release brings support for converting new third-party image formats, including Parallels Desktop virtual machines, newer versions of Symantec, Acronis, and StorageCraft. Registration is required for free download...

My old XP box may be failing -- possibly due to a CPU fan issue (which would be fixable if I cared enough [1]). Time for me to move all the data off to the iMac server and then make a VM from what remains. Then, if the machine really does fail, migration to a new iMac or even the "legacy" plastic MacBook (by far Apple's best value) would be only a few hours work.

[1] It takes up a lot of space and power and it can't run most of the apps (OS X) I prefer. I'm not ready to throw it out, but I wouldn't mind replacing it with an OS X machine.