Dear all,
I've just posted the below to a similar thread for Fusion 12 (but has been going on for years) so I thought this might be relevant to Fusion 13 too. Indeed, by own recent experience of Fusion hanging is with Fusion 13.
I'm pretty sure these phenomena are due to your VMs getting transferred into the cloud by iCloud.
Most of us will have iCloud active, and by default, iCloud backs up your Mac's Documents and Desktop folders to iCloud. Cruclally, it will transfer files entirely to the cloud, with no local copy on your Mac, if disk space gets low on your Mac.
If I recall, by default Fusion will create your VMs in a folder in Documents. VMs are often very large - easily 10s of Gb - so iCloud will often quietly transfer then entirely to the cloud to regain local disk space. This has been my experience anyway.
Go and have a look for yourself - find a VM you would like to open in your Mac's Finder and see if it has the cloud symbol next to it...
When you click on a file like this, iCloud then transfers the file back for local access on your Mac's disk.
However, A: This can take an appreciable amount of time, and B: you might not have enough space locally on your disk anyway...
For instance, Fusion on my Mac (I'm running Fusion 13 on MacOS 12.7) seemed to hang for a long time - like others have observed, for many hours - and when I noticed the VM I was trying to open had the cloud symbol by it in Finder, I did a rough calculation of how long the file would take to be copied back to my local disk, based on its size and my local network speed - for instance, a 100Gb VM transferring at 0.1Gbps.... will take 8000s to open! That's over 2 hours. And indeed that was indeed how long Fusion took to open roughly for the file in question.
Ok, but then why does Fusion hang when you are starting it up even when you are not trying to open a particular VM?:
I think this is the same phenomenon. Fusion usually start up and displays the list of recent VMs you have used. It's basically hanging before even this list appears, at least that's what happened to me.
I went back and looked at the VMs I had on Finder - several of these had the cloud symbol, showing that they had got transferred by iCloud fully into the cloud. Despite my efforts to get these transferred to my Mac's local disk (e.g right click on the VM in Finder and select "Download Now") some of the VMs never transferred, quite possibly because there just wasn't enough space on my Mac's disk locally (e.g a 100Gb VM with less than 100Gb free space on my Mac's disk)
I postulate that Fusion is checking ALL the VMs on the list in some way, and hangs until they are all present locally.
I assume that Fusion is asking MacOS to look at the VM files, and MacOS is asking iCloud to transfer the files back to Mac's local disk, and iCloud never completes this... because the network connection is slow, or there is not enough space on the local disk, etc. So VM just hangs - for hours (until iCloud transfers ALL the VMs back to the local disk) or forever (if there just isn't enough disk space)
There is an obvious test for this which is to totally disconnect your Mac from the network - no wifi, no ethernet etc.
I tried this - Fusion started working again instantly.
I then edited the list of VMs in Fusion - I deleted absolutely any VM from the list that I didn't need. NOTE, Fusion will ask if you want to delete the actual VM and its files, or just its presence in the list. Obviously, if you still need the VM, don't delete the files by accident!
Once you have your pruned list - and you have made sure that the VMs you need are indeed actually present locally on your Mac's disk and are not in the cloud - you will find that Fusion works perfectly again. At least, that's what happened to me.
You can always add a VM back onto the list later by opening that VM from Fusion's file menu. There's no real need to have all your VMs in the on screen list in Fusion all the time, since it obviously adds the possible hazard than any one of them might hang Fusion as above.
Many of you might scold me for allowing iCloud to get its hands on my VMs in the first place. To be fair, as I say if I recall correctly Fusion creates its folder of VMs in your Mac's Documents folder by default, and iCloud backs up the Documents folder also by default!
If you put your VMs your desktop instead.... iCloud backs up your Mac's desktop by default as well!
So, you would need to find some other place to put it. And from another angle, if your VMs are important to you then you probably DO want to have them backed up - somehow. Perhaps that could be a topic for another thread!
Ironically, I got myself in trouble with Fusion hanging again by trying to get iCloud to download my VMs back to the local disk, and then transferring them all to a RAID1 mirrored external drive I happen to have. Not all the VMs would complete the download - not enough disk space on my Mac.... - which I think "broke" Fusion's list of VMs again.
I will gingerly try opening the VMs from my external disk.... again that's maybe a topic for another thread.
Hope this is helpful to people!!
Original Message:
Sent: Jul 28, 2023 07:24 AM
From: JoSchu72
Subject: Fusion Pro 13 Hanging on startup
Thanks I will check. To be honest I m a apple enduser and cannot read the logs.
But as in the previous blogs. When I came back today ( I started it yesterday evening ), Fusion was waiting for me, so I lost only one day.
I added a screenshot of the launch statistics. It kept switching between 9 and 10 threads, so I thought there is an endless loop somewhere in the process. But somehow there was something which stopped it I have no clue what it was ..
I will check the article thanks for investigation colleagues ...