MacLochlainns Weblog

I was doing yet another install of Red Hat AS 4 in VMWare Fusion and ran into a new error. It’s the following: The virtual machine is unable to reserve memory.

The only way I found to fix this involves opening a terminal and killing the process manually. Killing without prejudice (cleanly shutdown the process and dependents) didn’t work. I had to kill it with prejudice (shutdown the process notwithstanding anything), then click the Abort button. The next error message says the peer process is missing and allows you to exit VMWare Fusion. Then, you reboot the Mac OS X.

The steps for find the process and killing it are:

1. Open a Terminal and run the following command:

# ps -ef | grep vmware

It returns something like this:

    0    90     1   0   0:00.00 ??         0:00.00 /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/vmnet-dhcpd -cf /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/vmnet8/dhcpd.conf -lf /var/db/vmware/vmnet-dhcpd-vmnet8.leases -pf /var/run/vmnet-dhcpd-vmnet8.pid vmnet8
    0    98     1   0   0:00.00 ??         0:00.00 /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/vmnet-dhcpd -cf /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/vmnet1/dhcpd.conf -lf /var/db/vmware/vmnet-dhcpd-vmnet1.leases -pf /var/run/vmnet-dhcpd-vmnet1.pid vmnet1
  501   160   115   0   1:44.12 ??         3:15.87 /Applications/VMware Fusion.app/Contents/MacOS/vmware -psn_0_77843
    0   322     1   0   0:00.07 ??         0:00.29 /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/vmware-vmx -E en -D ZjTtGrJgANADRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA= -# product=1;name=VMware Fusion;version=2.0;buildnumber=116369;licensename=VMware Fusion for Mac OS;licenseversion=6.0 build-116369; -@ pipe=/var/folders/fi/fiepDOKbFJeE42RxGcDBgU+++TI/-Tmp-//vmware-mclaughlinm/vmxd9641b5487a98f78;readyEvent=24 /Volumes/Disk2/Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 Oracle.vmwarevm/Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 Oracle.vmx
  501   397   303   0   0:00.00 ttys000    0:00.00 grep vmware

2. Kill the VMWare Fusion process by using the following syntax:

# kill -9 322

3. Reboot the operating system.

Running VMWare Fusion installations doesn’t require interaction. You can walk away from your Mac knowing it won’t go to sleep if you download Caffeine from the Apple download site. It lets you defer the Mac sleep cycle. I’ve found it very useful during the setup of my virtual machines, along with a 320 GB 2.5″ USB drive.

While I’ve worked on many systems over the years, principally Windows for the desktop, and Linux and Unix for the servers, I’ve begun to return to Apple because of Mac OS X. It different than the Apple 6 and Apple 7 that consumed me during my years at American President Lines in Oakland, California. The biggest difference is that my MacBookPro can run Mac OS X, Windows XP x64, Ubuntu, Red Hat 4 in virtual machines courtesy of VMWare Fusion. This affords me a great set of testing environments on a single machine. That does exclude Microsoft Vista. I’ve found Vista’s memory demands coupled with the Oracle 11g really requires 3 GB, and therefore a separate physical machine. I typically only run one virtual machine at a time because they’re allocated 2 GB of memory, and my MacBookPro only (my how life changes) supports 4 GB or memory.

My son just talked me into using Quicksilver, an application launcher – it’s great. I think he’ll make a great technology evangelist someday. You can find more Mac, Ruby, and Django (a Python framework) tricks and techniques on his blog. He’s also just started a gig doing hybrid application development for the iPod and iPhone. I think you’ll be seeing news on that front too.