vmware and hibernation don't play nicely together

[Shaya Potter]

if one has vmware installed on their laptop, vmware generally works well, except
if one hibernates their laptop. It seems if one does this (and at least is
using NAT based networking) after one returns from hibernation one can't connect
from the host to the vm and one has to reboot. Not sure what's going on.

[Thom May (thombot)]

sounds like vmware isn't recovering from suspend correctly; I suggest you raise
a support ticket with them.

[Shaya Potter (spotter)]

I'm not convinced about this.

reasoning being that vmware's devices are ifconfig'd down on hibernation, but
are not brought up correctly on restart.

[Shaya Potter (spotter)]

reopening as have verified if one comments out

from prepare.sh

for x in $INTERFACES; do
    ifdown $x;
    ifconfig $x down;
done

and from resume.sh

ifup -a &

then vmware works perfectly.

for some reason in my test when I only commented out ifconfig $x down (to let
ifdow for /etc/network/interfaces define interfaced to go down and up) the
machine hung on restart. Didn't have time to see if it was a freak occurance or
not.

[Matthew Garrett (mjg59)]

Interfaces are brought down on suspend so we can unload the drivers, but we
don't store configuration information over the cycle. You can probably work
around this by adding your vmnet configuration to /etc/network/interfaces, but
I'll look into a better solution.

[Jonathan Carter (jonathan)]

Can you please try with the latest version of VMWare and Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, and assess whether the problem persists?

thank you

[Alexandre Rocha Lima e Marcondes (alexandre-psl-pr)]

This is a problem that seems to appear on latest vmware-player ubuntu package. I use it every day and everytime I suspend my laptop I have to close vmware-player and do:

$ sudo /etc/ini.t/vmware-player restart

Only then I can start vmware-player again and have working network on it.

[Jeff (jeffgregory)]

This problem exists in dapper. Vmware's vmnet adapters show up in ifconfig, but are started using vmware's script. If they are shutdown by the suspend script, the resume script can't restart them. My fix is to add a pipe to sed to remove vmnets from the list of interfaces that should be shutdown and restored.
< INTERFACES=`/sbin/ifconfig | awk '/^[^ ]+/ {print $1}'`
---
> # Remove any vmnets (vmware) from the list since these are not using drivers
> INTERFACES=`/sbin/ifconfig | awk '/^[^ ]+/ {print $1}' | sed 's/vmnet//'`

it works for me, and I don't think any other networks use the vmnet name (and if they did, it would still work with a slightly larger hibernate image).

[aexl (aexl)]

My Vmwarte server says
"Interface vmnet1 is not marked 'up'...."
if i start a VM after Hibernate. After reboot everything works fine.

This is a real showstopper in our company, as we extensively use windows VMs on notebooks.

[aexl (aexl)]

Thanks Jeff for your Patch.
In edgy the file to patch is /etc/acpi/suspend.d/55-down-interfaces.sh

[aexl (aexl)]

i can confirm this bug in current feisty.
the workaround "adding vmware to STOP_SERVICES in /etc/default/acpi-support" from
http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-335736.html does not work for me.
when i find time i will try this patch.

[aexl (aexl)]

i read some sources and figured out:
you would have to add "vmware-server" to STOP_SERVICES in /etc/default/acpi-support
(at least with the deb package from canonical)
BUT: when hibernating now, any VM is just powered off, the console disconnected.
no good.

[Onno Benschop (onno-itmaze)]

Under feisty I suspect that most users would need to add "vmware-player" to STOP_SERVICES in /etc/default/acpi-support. (This is because the script that actually starts and stops the network is called vmware-player and lives in /etc/init.d/ )

Of course if you're running the vmware-server package from the Canonical repository then this bug report has nothing to do with that :)

[Onno Benschop (onno-itmaze)]

You should know that this won't work if the player is running because it refuses to stop the service with a running instance.

[Darik Horn (dajhorn)]

The patch never made it into Ubuntu 7.10, so this problem persists with VMware Player, VMware Workstation, and VMware Server running on Gutsy.

[JakeG (ubuntu-jakeg)]

I can confirm that this is a bug with Ubuntu 7.10 and VMWare Server 1.0.4 from Ubuntu's partner repository. I don't know about hibernate, but it happens on suspend. Following a suspend, vmnet1 isn't shown at all when 'ifconfig' is run.

Anyone had any luck with a fix?

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

In Ubuntu 9.10, acpi-support no longer brings down all network interfaces as part of a suspend/hibernate. Closing this as resolved.