Thank you. While I don't knowingly create aliases or shortcuts, I suspect the Desktop folder has some activity from Windows when mirrored, and something there could have been the issue. Since removing mirroring for the Desktop folder only, no crashes for a few days. Could have been just an unfortunate convergence of coincidences.
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Original Message:
Sent: Oct 07, 2025 12:23 PM
From: Technogeezer
Subject: VMware Fusion 13.6.4 on macOS Sonoma 14.8 Windows 10 VM Crash
Could you please point me to specific things I should look for to possibly reset that data or possible steps to mitigate whatever is going on there. I do need to access the Mac data from Windows, although I can manage without accessing the Desktop.
On the Mac side the first thing I'd look for are shortcuts, symbolic links, or aliases that point to locations that aren't available to the VMs. For example if you have an alias on your desktop that points to something outside of your Desktop folder.
You might want to think about only sharing only the folder containing the items you want to use between the Mac and Windows VM. For example, if all of your folder are in your Documents folder, only configure that folder with Fusion folder sharing to the Windows VM. Those documents won't be found in the Documents folder of your VM, but you should be able to get to them through the shared file system - it'll look like a network drive.
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- Paul (technogeezer)
vExpert 2025
Original Message:
Sent: Oct 07, 2025 06:41 AM
From: Macatak
Subject: VMware Fusion 13.6.4 on macOS Sonoma 14.8 Windows 10 VM Crash
After reverting to Sonoma 14.4 on a second identical system, the VM crashed on it too. I had installed a clean 14.4 and then did a user data migration. Whether that carried over some gremlin is unknown.
I had thought the upgrade to 14.8 had caused an incompatibility but now it seems it is with the VM itself. Do they degrade over time, especially with the folder mirroring?!
After removing Desktop folder mirroring on both machines (identical hardware, one with Sonoma 14.4 and one with 14.8.1), the VM has not crashed on either system in over 24 hours and counting, which seems to be a good sign.
It begs the question what has caused this, as it was not an issue until the Sonoma 14.8 upgrade from 14.7. Since the same file and settings had crash issues on 14.4, apparently there is something else going on.
If things remain stable I will update the 14.4 system to 14.8.1 but not without first making a SuperDuper! backup to restore from if need be.
@Technogeezer, you mentioned logs showing something about possible bugs in resolving bookmark data. Could you please point me to specific things I should look for to possibly reset that data or possible steps to mitigate whatever is going on there. I do need to access the Mac data from Windows, although I can manage without accessing the Desktop.
Since the crash issue seems to have been resolved for the time being with the deselecting Desktop mirroring, it's not hindering workflow.
But inquiring minds like to know!
Hope that makes sense.
Thank you!
Original Message:
Sent: Oct 04, 2025 01:24 PM
From: Macatak
Subject: VMware Fusion 13.6.4 on macOS Sonoma 14.8 Windows 10 VM Crash
I'll keep posting updates in the hopes the Broadcom Fusion developers may be monitoring these communities. These are issues on a current macOS (Sonoma 14.x) and Fusion (13.6.4).
Turns out a USB SSD may not be as viable as hoped.
Today all **** seems to have broken loose, with multiple Windows crashes with blue recovery screens. The VM did boot successfully after each crash, but recurring Windows log entries seem to point to power loss. I am not sure if that is connected to sleep modes in Windows or macOS, as I have not correlated those, but something is triggering something, and none of this was happening prior to macOS updates to 14.8 or 14.8.1.
I have installed Sonoma 14.4 on a near-identical iMac 2020 (64GB instead of 96GB) and will run the VM on there for an extended period and monitor what happens. I will incrementally update Sonoma and see what happens, stopping with 14.7.7, which I believe was the last version that was compatible with Fusion 13.6.4, as far as my experience demonstrates.
If I was to theorise, perhaps whatever 'security' goodies Apple has stuffed into Tahoe they may have stuffed into Sonoma and Sequoia in their updates, resulting in introducing certain incompatibilities with finicky systems like virtual machines.
I am curious if others have experienced similar issues on Intel iMacs or MacBooks with this version of Sonoma 14.8.x and Fusion 13.6.4.
It's a time-consuming PITA.
Original Message:
Sent: Oct 03, 2025 08:13 PM
From: Macatak
Subject: VMware Fusion 13.6.4 on macOS Sonoma 14.8 Windows 10 VM Crash
SD was more out of practicality/availability than preference, but that backfired so I've had to adjust. Too few ports.
So far the VM running from the USB SSD seems fine. No crashes. Folder mirroring is still in place.
Nonetheless, the issues you've identified (getting more technical than I have had to in my use of Fusion thus far) were inconsequential prior to whatever changed with macOS 14.8, so I am leaving everything status quo for the time being and will adjust as necessary, if necessary. I prefer the mirrored folders for the tasks I use this VM for, if things can be managed that way.
One happy outcome is with the move to the 2TB SSD, I have also moved the Parallels VM files I have to that drive as well, freeing more space on the internal 512GB SSD. I don't generally run Fusion and Parallels concurrently, so clogging that port with read-write data dumps doesn't present an issue.
Incidentally, since this appears to have been a storage issue connected to macOS Sonoma 14.8 and Fusion 13.6.4, even before encountering this problem, I had wanted to upgrade the internal 512GB SSD to 2TB until I discovered this 2020 iMac model has an integrated logic board SSD and no internal upgrade pathway. Such a pita! Did not anticipate that detail when I bought the machine, used (needed Intel CPU).
I sincerely appreciate the insights and technical support. It guided me to a viable resolution, and more learning about my systems.
Thank you.
Original Message:
Sent: Oct 03, 2025 05:34 PM
From: Technogeezer
Subject: VMware Fusion 13.6.4 on macOS Sonoma 14.8 Windows 10 VM Crash
Running on an SD card isn't the best long-term solution. SD cards don't have the performance or durability of HDD or SSD media.
I'd still take a look at disabling folder mirroring and see if that makes any kind of difference. Especially since there are complaints about unresolved bookmarks when trying to resolve aliases in the shared file system. The log I saw had the timing of the crash right after one of those messages about resolving bookmark data for a file. It's possible that this is a bug in the folder sharing implementation given what I've seen in the logs. As I've said, the folder sharing feature (at least on Windows running under Fusion on Intel) is well known to be... shall we say.... not terribly performant or robust.
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- Paul (technogeezer)
vExpert 2025
Original Message:
Sent: Oct 03, 2025 10:12 AM
From: Macatak
Subject: VMware Fusion 13.6.4 on macOS Sonoma 14.8 Windows 10 VM Crash
I wanted to update...
I copied the VM to a 256GB SDXC UHS-II card. The VM ran fine, but would intermittently crash and reboot successfully, so different than the previous crashes, which would not reboot without an entire macOS system reboot.
Checking the Windows logs it seems it is a power loss causing these, so I am guessing the power to the iMac's built-in SD card reader is inconsistent and the fluctuations caused the lost power reboots.
So I have now moved the VM to an external 2TB SSD connected to a USB-C port and will see how that goes!
In summary, whatever those variables may be (primarily available storage space), they were introduced with the macOS Sonoma 14.8 update and its incompatibilities with VMware Fusion 13.6.4, I believe, as no other changes were made to this system and the VM had been running flawlessly since mid-summer when I moved everything to this iMac.
Other insights are certainly welcome, if others have experienced similar issues with Sonoma and VMware Fusion.
Original Message:
Sent: Oct 02, 2025 04:42 AM
From: Macatak
Subject: VMware Fusion 13.6.4 on macOS Sonoma 14.8 Windows 10 VM Crash
Thank you. Those are very helpful and insightful suggestions.
It was Finder reporting free space, which I have noticed is unreliable. I only recently turned on Time Machine for this system, but it was some time before the macOS update, so I wouldn't say it was the culprit until this latest macOS 14.8 update, and perhaps that introduced some incompatibilities.
I also noticed that when I deleted a large number of files from an external USB drive which in some manner must be temporarily affecting local storage, the VM crashed. There may be temporal relationship to that too, although like TM, it was never an issue before these latest updates.
I turned off TM yesterday and the VM is still running right now, but I haven't done any large file deletion operations.
I will move the VM to an external drive. I have been reluctant to do that but since you have recommended that, I'll give it a go. I don't really have any spare USB ports so will first try the SD card with a high read-write speed and test that (a quick test on a slower spare SD card seems fine, so I'll go ahead and get some faster and larger capacity cards). If over time it becomes an issue I may have to re-configure some port assignments. It's a decent solution to try for now.
This system has 96GB RAM and there are no memory issues reported.
From piecing together various elements in play, I would say it is drive space that is contributing to the crash issue, so I will address that first.
I will make the other revisions you have suggested as well.
Regardless, it would seem the primary contributing factor is the macOS update to 14.8 and whatever it introduced to storage management (along with TM), as all other factors were in place and there were no crash issues.
Onward!
Thanks again.
Original Message:
Sent: Oct 01, 2025 10:02 PM
From: Technogeezer
Subject: VMware Fusion 13.6.4 on macOS Sonoma 14.8 Windows 10 VM Crash
Some random thoughts while looking at the log you provided (thanks!)
You say there's 100GB of disk space available, but what's reporting that? Disk Utility or Finder. If it's the Finder, is there an indication of how much disk space is purgeable? (The Finder has an annoying habit of including purgeable space in that available number. The actual amount of free space you have on your disk can be found with Disk Utility, or by subtracting the purgeable space from what the Finder says is available space). If that number is low, you might want to check the Disk Utility and see if there are local snapshots for your system disk's Data partition that haven't been flushed by Time Machine.
You're running your VM on the system disk - which can be a big problem if that disk is being backed up by Time Machine. At a minimum you should exclude the folder containing the virtual machines from Time Machine backups . Time Machine is a terribly inefficient backup utility for virtual machines.
But even if you do exclude virtual machines from Time Machine backups,, the snapshots used by Time Machine are still capturing the virtual machine's data and the virtual machines will bloat the size of the Time Machine snapshots based on the amount of activity you have on the virtual machines. It's best to store virtual machines on their own disk (best to use an external USB3 SSD) that is not enabled at all for Time Machine backups. (A volume not enabled for Time Machine backups won't have snapshots taken).
How much memory is on this iMac, and what does Activity Monitor say for memory pressure?
I'm noticing that you have desktop folder mirroring turned on. And there are error messaged being thrown by "hgfs" - which is Fusion shared folders which are used by that feature. Have you tried to turn off desktop mirroring in Fusion, and only mirror the folders you have interest in (I'd recommend not mirroring your desktop folder - Windows crud will pollute it). VMware shared folders across all of their desktop hypervisor products is known to be flaky.
The VM is crashing with a signal 6 (SIGABRT) which means that something is raising an error condition. The stack trace seems to indicate that the error may be happening during memory allocation within the hypervisor. Is this machine running out of memory or disk space while the VM is running?
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- Paul (technogeezer)
vExpert 2025
Original Message:
Sent: Oct 01, 2025 06:31 PM
From: Macatak
Subject: VMware Fusion 13.6.4 on macOS Sonoma 14.8 Windows 10 VM Crash
Spoke too soon.
Crashed soon after. After a system reboot, Windows presented a Recovery Screen, but I chose the option to continue, and Windows booted normally.
I cleaned up any temporary files, shut down the VM and did the clean-up routine which deleted 12GB of bloat. I do this regularly.
One potential factor could be the system has a relatively small SSD, 512GB, and currently shows 100GB available. The VM itself is ~60GB.
I am wondering if between the Time Machine temporary files that seem to consume gobs of space are causing an issue with whatever incremental bloat occurs with Fusion.
It's strange because those aspects have not materially changed; only the update to Sonoma (14.7.8, prior to 14.8) is the significant change.
I have attached the log file found in the VM.
I had also captured a Problem Report from a crash yesterday. Is there something specific in that that would be helpful? I see a fair number of log files in different folders.
Fortunately I am not losing any data, it's just a real pita and disruption to workflow, that something recently introduced is contributing to the issue.
Thank you!
Original Message:
Sent: Oct 01, 2025 02:51 PM
From: Technogeezer
Subject: VMware Fusion 13.6.4 on macOS Sonoma 14.8 Windows 10 VM Crash
The logs specific to the virtual machine are found in the Virtual Machine's bundle, not the VMware Fusion application bundle.
Go to the Finder and locate your virtual machine.
Then right click on the virtual machine and select "Show Package Contents". The log files should be there.
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- Paul (technogeezer)
vExpert 2025
Original Message:
Sent: Oct 01, 2025 02:44 AM
From: Macatak
Subject: VMware Fusion 13.6.4 on macOS Sonoma 14.8 Windows 10 VM Crash
Sad to report the 14.8.1 update did not resolve this issue. Too much to hope for!
After a few hours, I swiped over to the VM and it was running fine, and I swiped back to macOS and carried on with other tasks. A few minutes later when I swiped back, it had crashed, this time with a report window. I don't recall that previous times, but maybe it had disappeared or became hidden when I swiped over and didn't notice.
I tried looking in the bundle (application package?) for anything that looked like a log and didn't see anything. Could you please specify what I should look for?
I do see a few log files in the report folder generated from the crash reporter.
I tried launching the VM without a reboot, but the same thing happened, another crash, and the crash window appeared.
After a total system reboot the VM is running again, for now.
Original Message:
Sent: Sep 30, 2025 04:58 PM
From: Technogeezer
Subject: VMware Fusion 13.6.4 on macOS Sonoma 14.8 Windows 10 VM Crash
Can you post a copy of the log files found within the VM's bundle? Perhaps there's something in there that might give us a clue about what might be going on.
By any chance are you seeing the Fusion GUI window crash, but the VM is still running in the background. You can check that by exiting the Fusion GUI, dropping into the Terminal app, and running 'vmrun list' and see if there are any running VMs.
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- Paul (technogeezer)
vExpert 2025
Original Message:
Sent: Sep 30, 2025 04:44 PM
From: Macatak
Subject: VMware Fusion 13.6.4 on macOS Sonoma 14.8 Windows 10 VM Crash
Wondering if anyone else has encountered this issue, and if so, the resolution:
Previous Windows 10 VM on macOS Sonoma 14.7.8 worked flawlessly. This is on a 2020 iMac 27" Retina (Intel).
Since the macOS update to 14.8, when I switch to the VM I discover it has crashed and just shows the launch startup arrow.
I click it and Windows gets to a certain point and then crashes.
I have to restart the system...so far I've just been replacing the VM with a backup copy and that boots fine, so I am not certain a simple Mac reboot resolves it, but that is somewhat irrelevant anyway as the same crash issue recurs.
Since this issue only seems to have developed since the macOS update to 14.8, it seems that is the culprit.
I just noticed there is an update to Sonoma 14.8.1 released yesterday, so I will see if that magically resolves the issue.
Meanwhile, maybe someone has encountered the issue and can offer some insight with a permanent solution.
Thank you.
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