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Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for the ‘Fusion’ Category

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When your Windows 8.1 mouse cursor is invisible in the screen center on VMware Fusion

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/10/02

Remove the

Remove the “VMware Pointing Device” using “devmgmt.msc”

Somehow I have it happen every now and then on Windows (usually 8.1 x64) VMs running inside a VMware (usually Fusion) that the mouse cursor is stuck.

VMware Tools were already at the latest version and a plain reboot didn’t help.

It doesn’t matter if I was running full screen or Windows and altering these mouse settings did not change the behaviour:

  • Enable pointer shadow
  • Display pointer trails (long or short: does not matter)

I did enable Show location of pointer when I press the CTRL key which then indicated the mouse pointer was static at the screen center.

The only thing to get the mouse respond to mouse movement were these steps:

  1. Start Device Manager using devmgmt.msc
  2. Switch to the Devices by Connection view from the View menu
  3. Open these sub-trees:
    1. Your machine in this case my machine W81ENTX64VS2015
    2. ACPI x64-based PC
    3. Microsoft ACPI-Compliant System
    4. PCI Bus
    5. Intel 82371AB/EB PCI to ISA bridge (ISA mode)
  4. Now delete the VMware Pointing Device
  5. Reboot after Device Manager ask you to do so

After that my mouse cursor works fine.

Just in case you bump into a similar thing, but the above steps don’t help, here are some links with different steps that might work in your situation:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Fusion, Power User, Virtualization, VMware, Windows, Windows 8.1 | Leave a Comment »

use vmrun – via How do I find the IP address of a virtual machine using VMware Fusion? – Super User

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/04/20

Note this works only when the VMs have VMware Tools installed (more on that below):

VMWare provides, not surprisingly, a built in tool for this, vmrun. It’s under /Applications/VMware Fusion.app/Contents/Library/vmrun although it has moved around in other Fusion releases a bit.

🍺 vmrun list Total running VMs: 1 .docker/machine/machines/myvm.vmx
🍺 vmrun getGuestIPAddress ~/.docker/machine/machines/myvm.vmx 172.16.213.128

via: How do I find the IP address of a virtual machine using VMware Fusion? – Super User [WayBack]

vmrun [WayBack] is barely documented and most of is in PDF of which this is the most recent I could find: www.vmware.com/pdf/vix180_vmrun_command.pdf [WayBack]

Based on the above path, I added this to my ~/.bash_profile file:

alias vmrun='/Applications/VMware\ Fusion.app/Contents/Library/vmrun'
alias vmrun-list-running-VMs='vmrun list | grep vmx'
vmrun-list-ipv4-of-running-VMs()
{
  vmrun-list-running-VMs | while read line ; do echo $line && vmrun getGuestIPAddress $line; done
}

Now I can do this:

$ vmrun-list-ipv4-of-running-VMs
/Users/jeroenp/VM/W81Entx64DelphiRegression.vmwarevm/W81Entx64.vmx
172.16.172.135
/Users/jeroenp/VM/diaspore-opensuse-Tumbleweed-x64.vmwarevm/diaspore-opensuse-Tumbleweed-x64.vmx
Error: The VMware Tools are not running in the virtual machine: /Users/jeroenp/VM/diaspore-opensuse-Tumbleweed-x64.vmwarevm/diaspore-opensuse-Tumbleweed-x64.vmx
$ vmrun-list-ipv4-of-running-VMs
/Users/jeroenp/VM/diaspore.opensuse-Tumbleweed-x64/diaspore.opensuse-Tumbleweed-x64.vmx
Error: Unable to get the IP address
/Users/jeroenp/VM/W81Entx64DelphiRegression.vmwarevm/W81Entx64.vmx
172.16.172.135
$ vmrun-list-ipv4-of-running-VMs
/Users/jeroenp/VM/diaspore.opensuse-Tumbleweed-x64/diaspore.opensuse-Tumbleweed-x64.vmx
Error: Unable to get the IP address
/Users/jeroenp/VM/W81Entx64DelphiRegression.vmwarevm/W81Entx64.vmx
172.16.172.135
$ vmrun-list-ipv4-of-running-VMs
/Users/jeroenp/VM/diaspore.opensuse-Tumbleweed-x64/diaspore.opensuse-Tumbleweed-x64.vmx
172.16.172.134
/Users/jeroenp/VM/W81Entx64DelphiRegression.vmwarevm/W81Entx64.vmx
172.16.172.135
$ vmrun-list-ipv4-of-running-VMs
/Users/jeroenp/VM/diaspore.opensuse-Tumbleweed-x64/diaspore.opensuse-Tumbleweed-x64.vmx
172.16.172.134
/Users/jeroenp/VM/W81Entx64DelphiRegression.vmwarevm/W81Entx64.vmx
172.16.172.142

These are the messages I observed:

Error: The VMware Tools are not running in the virtual machine: /Users/jeroenp/VM/diaspore-opensuse-Tumbleweed-x64.vmwarevm/diaspore-opensuse-Tumbleweed-x64.vmx
Error: Unable to get the IP address
172.16.172.135

The first one means a machine is running but has no VMware Tools installed. For an OpenSuSE machine you can install it with zypper install open-vm-tools, for other Linux systems read VMware Tools auf Ubuntu, Mint, CentOS oder openSUSE installieren | ITrig [WayBack]

Some more examples of vmrun for VMware Fusion are at Control VMware Fusion from the Command Line | James Reuben Knowles [WayBack]

–jeroen

Posted in *nix, bash, Development, Fusion, openSuSE, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, SuSE Linux, Tumbleweed, Virtualization, VMware | Leave a Comment »

SysInternals sdelete: zero wipe free space is called -z instead of -c

Posted by jpluimers on 2016/09/20

In the 2009 past, sdelete used the -c parameter to zero wipe clean a hard drive and -z would clean it with a random pattern.

That has changed. Somewhere along the lines, -c and -z has swapped meaning which I didn’t notice.

This resulted in many of my virtual machines image backups were a lot larger than they needed to be.

The reason is that now:

  • -c does a clean free space with a random DoD conformant pattern (which does not compress well)
  • -z writes zeros in the free space

Incidently, -c is a lot slower than -z as well.

TL;DR: use this command

sdelete -z C:

Where C: is the drive to zero clean the free space.

–jeroen

Posted in Batch-Files, Development, Fusion, Hyper-V, Power User, Proxmox, Scripting, sdelete, Software Development, SysInternals, View, VirtualBox, Virtualization, VMware, VMware ESXi, VMware Workstation, Windows | Leave a Comment »

Tools that Isotopp installed on his Mac…

Posted by jpluimers on 2016/04/01

IRC so: »i> Isotopp: Ich habe jetzt nen Mac als Arbeitsplatzrechner… Was will man als UNIX Hacker zuerst an Tools installieren?«

Source: IRC so: »i> Isotopp: Ich habe jetzt nen Mac als Arbeitsplatzrechner… Was will… by Kristian Köhntopp.

Since G+ is very bad at searching, I created this summary of the tools; read the full G+ post (Google Translate is quite OK), including comments on why.

Edit: 20160402 – I’m posting regular updates based on the comments for that G+ post. I’ve changed or added German iTunes store links to US-English ones.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Apple, Audacity, Audio, Fusion, Hardware, Keybase, Keyboards and Keyboard Shortcuts, KVM keyboard/video/mouse, Mac, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, MacBook, MacBook Retina, MacBook-Pro, Media, OS X 10.10 Yosemite, OS X 10.11 El Capitan, Power User, Security, VirtualBox, Virtualization, VMware | Leave a Comment »

Solving VMware Fusion 6 and Windows 7 VM performance issues | Shogan.tech

Posted by jpluimers on 2016/03/21

Add these entries to your .vmx file:

MemTrimRate = "0"
sched.mem.pshare.enable = "FALSE"
prefvmx.useRecommendedLockedMemSize = "TRUE"

Works in VMware Fusion 5, 6, and 7. Probably 8 too.

–jeroen

via Solving VMware Fusion 6 and Windows 7 VM performance issues | Shogan.tech.

Posted in Fusion, Power User, Virtualization, VMware | 2 Comments »

Increasing your Windows NTFS disk size under VMware ESXi

Posted by jpluimers on 2015/04/03

A really long time I wrote about Increasing your Windows XP NTFS disk size under VMware Workstation 7.

I totally forgot that article also included a link to do the same on ESXi the old fashioned style. The tool you needed back then (and still works) there is vmkfstools (the ESXi version, not the vCLI version), and use it like this to extend the VMDK disk to 60 gigabyte:

vmkfstools --extendvirtualdisk 60G /vmfs/volumes/datastore_name/vm_name/disk_name.vmdk

You can replace --extendvirtualdisk with -X.

However, nowadays you can do the same from the vSphere Client as explained by David Davis at How to Extend a vSphere Windows VM Disk Volume.

After that you follow the steps in the original article to increase the partition size inside Windows.

As of Windows Vista, this has become much easier, so there you go.

–jeroen

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in ESXi5.1, ESXi5.5, Fusion, Power User, VMware, VMware ESXi | Leave a Comment »

Skype Mix Minus – via: Joe Hecht – Google+

Posted by jpluimers on 2015/02/25

Joe Hecht on Skype Mix Minus – Google+.

Using USB audio mixers, Skype in VM, Virtual Sound Routing, and capturing video.

Awesome read!

–jeroen

Posted in Fusion, Power User, Skype, VMware, VMware Workstation | Leave a Comment »

VMware Fusion: Alt+Print Screen on MacBook Pro

Posted by jpluimers on 2014/09/01

VMware Fusion only allows you to send a “Print Scrn” key to a VM, but that takes a screenshot of the whole screen.

Alt+Print Scrn gets you a screenshot of the current Window, which is what I use most often.

A few things you might have tried, but cannot use:

So have to map key combinations that you probably will not use under Windows.

Berknip uses these VMware Fusion keyboard mappings for it: Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Apple, Fusion, Keyboards and Keyboard Shortcuts, Mac, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, MacBook, MacBook Retina, MacBook-Air, MacBook-Pro, OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, Power User, VMware | Leave a Comment »

Reduce size of guest vmdk disks with VMware Fusion 4.1.3 on OS X 10.8 | aitrusblog

Posted by jpluimers on 2014/05/16

Reminder to self: how to decrease vmdk disk size of guest OS (check if it works with Windows guests) using VMware Fusion on Mac OS X.

–jeroen

via: Reduce size of guest vmdk disks with VMware Fusion 4.1.3 on OS X 10.8 | aitrusblog.

Posted in Apple, Fusion, Mac, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, MacBook, MacBook Retina, MacBook-Air, OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, Power User, VMware | Leave a Comment »

“There is not enough space on the file system for the selected operation” in VMware Fusion or Workstation

Posted by jpluimers on 2014/04/19

Both VMware Fusion and Workstation can give you the error “There is not enough space on the file system for the selected operation” if you expand the virtual disk of a virtual machine.

It occurs when there is less free disk space available on the host disk containing the virtual disk than the newly requested space of the virtual disk. In short: you must have enough room to store the original virtual disk plus the expanded virtual disk. This holds for VMware Player too.

This is a real problem if your main system has SSD only (like a Retina MacBook Pro) where there is an even bigger fight for disk space than HDD based hosts.

It is one of the reasons not only my main system has an SSD drive, but also an external USB3 SSD drive to temporarily make more room available.

–jeroen

Posted in Fusion, Power User, VMware, VMware Workstation | Tagged: , | Leave a Comment »

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