VMWare

When installing SAS on Windows 7, typically you'd right-click on setup.exe and choose Run as Administrator, watch the SAS Deployment Wizard come up and the blue progress bar start moving. But! Then Windows 7 suddenly says "Console Window Host has stopped working." and offers to close the program. The Deployment Wizard may run for a while longer and silently disappear.

The entry in the Windows Application Log is not much help; it just says "Event 1000, Application Error: Faulting application name: conhost.exe".

The reason this is happening is that the SAS installer is trying to write to a temp file. Because you have VMWare Fusion set up to share folders between the Mac and the PC, when the installer tries to write a log file VMWare Fusion denies it, and the installer freaks out and dies.

The solution is:

1. Shut down your virtual machine.

2. Turn off "Share folders on your Mac" in the virtual machine settings.
3. Start your virtual machine back up.
4. Run the installer with no problems.
5. Turn sharing back on again once SAS is installed.

Reference:
http://www.mathkb.com/Uwe/Forum.aspx/sas/47604/SAS-Mac-VMWare-Fusion

If you have a bunch of VMWare Fusion virtual machines running, you can suspend them programmatically using vmrun and rsync them to a mounted volume. Then, with the copy completed, you can resume the virtual machines.

#!/bin/bash

BACKUPDIR=/Volumes/Backup/VMs

/Library/Application\ Support/VMware\ Fusion/vmrun list | tail -n +2 | while read VM
do
  echo "Suspending $VM"
  time /Library/Application\ Support/VMware\ Fusion/vmrun -T fusion suspend "$VM"
  echo "Suspended $VM"
  
  DIR=`dirname "$VM"`
  echo "Rsyncing $DIR"
  rsync -av "$DIR" "$BACKUPDIR"
 
  echo "Resuming $VM"
  time /Library/Application\ Support/VMware\ Fusion/vmrun -T fusion start "$VM"
  echo "Resumed $VM"
done

Note: this hung on Windows VMs until I updated VMWare Tools to the latest version on the guest. The above is currently working on Fusion 3.1 for RHEL5 and Windows 2008 R2 Server guests.

As part of my testing setup, I have an Intel Mac Pro with Mac OS X 10.6 Server (which runs with the 64-bit kernel) on which I run VMWare Fusion 3.0.1 and several Red Hat virtual machines.

I noticed that even at idle, each VM was taking up a high amount (like 100%!) of a CPU core. Additionally, on one VM top was displaying in near-real-time, which was kind of neat but I doubt the intended behavior. Because of this, I suspected the time management in the kernel was off.

Sure enough, Timekeeping Best Practices for Linux Guests has some hints, and for more information than you'll ever want, try Timekeeping in VMWare Virtual Machines (I was particularly interested in the Clocksource Kernels section).

Making the following modification to /etc/grub.conf on RHEL5 brought my CPU usage down from 100% to barely noticeable:

Before:

kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.18-164.11.1.el5 ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet

After:

kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.18-164.11.1.el5 ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb divider=10

I took out quiet because I like to see what's happening when the system boots.

The Note on RHEL 5.4 or CentOS and divider=10 mentions that you do not need this for RHEL 5.4 for accurate timekeeping, but you do need it to prevent the excessive CPU use.

I also modified /etc/ntp.conf as described in the above article, adding

tinker panic 0

to the top of the file and commenting out the following lines:

My VMs are down from 100 percent CPU use to practically zero. Think of the energy savings!