I've been trying out VMWare Workstation on a Windows 10 System. The hardware is relatively old (i7 with 16Gb RAM and new 3Tb 6Gbs SATA drive) and on it are a couple of VMs. They are quite large and were originally player VMs. Both have two 200Gb Drives.
So here's the issue, if the Windows 10 system crashes, ie. the VMs are abruptly terminated, when I try to restart them I get he message 'Cannot find xxxx.VMX'. As it urns out, it isn't the VMX file that it cannot find, but one of the 30 VMDK files. So say for example XXXXX-s019.VMDK just goes missing. This makes the Drive totally useless. I have been able to copy the VMDK file from a backup, but if you have snapshots it's no longer named the same XXXXXX-000002-s019.VMDK, but say XXXXXX-000004-s019.VMDK so it becomes confusing.
I though this was strange (and unacceptable) behaviour, ie. the system crashes or reboots (happened when Windows decided to update itself) and your VM is no longer usable. Yes, keep backups, etc etc, but note once you get these corruptions your 3x2x2 auto protect snapshots are also useless.
My questions:
- Is this software so sensitive that, if for whatever reason, the power is pulled your VMs are corrupt and unusable?
- Is that expected bahaviour?
- Is this acceptable behaviour?
If it is I will look to running something else like parallels on my MAC for VMS, because I know if I pull the power on my mac and parallels VMs are running, I lose some of the latest data, but the complete system isn't trashed.
Any advice appreciated.
Cheers
KB