VMware Fusion on exFAT

The skinny :

VMware Fusion wastes 30 seconds of your life accomplishing apparently absolutely nothing every time you start or resume-from-disk a virtual machine on an exFAT volume.

There appears to be no workaround.

The fat :

I love virtualization.  And the more I use it, the more I love it.

It has come a long way.

I remember 12 years ago giving up in frustration when I tried to virtualize my entire software development environment.

The big issue back then was the storage system.

Now with so many so-awesome SSDs to choose from, virtualization is a pleasure.

I'm running my virtualized software development environment with I'd guess about a 10-20% performance penalty, vs the literally 200-2000% performance penalty I was experiencing 12 years ago.

And since computers are generally so fast these days, 10-20% performance penalty largely translates into no significant difference at all.

Mac & PC

I happen to be a dual-mode man.  Surface Pro 2 256GB (love it!), and Mac Mini quad-core i7 16GB RAM.  I mainly do Windows stuff, and prefer the more extensive range of keyboard shortcuts in Windows for maximum productivity (whereas with Mac you are forced to keep moving your hand back to the mouse/trackpad whether you like it or not).  But I'm very comfortable and proficient in both environments.

I wonder, could I...  Get an external SSD and put my virtual machines on it.  Then, using VMware Fusion on the Mac and VMware Player or Workstation in Windows, I can run my virtual machines on the faster more powerful Mac Mini when inside, whilst still being able to take my work on the road and run exactly the same VMs on the Surface Pro 2.

Great idea!

But so many snags.

First off, you are going to encrypt that external SSD, right?  I mean, nobody puts sensitive data on an unencrypted external storage device I hope?  (Other than government departments of course - but who expects competence from them?)

Problemo : Windows has BitLocker, and Mac has FileVault, and ne'er the twain shall meet!

And whilst you can get cool third-party utilities to read+write Mac disk format from Windows, and likewise to read Windows disk format from Mac, none of these utilities support encrypted volumes.  Major problem!  Looks like we're scuttled right at the git go!

Well, there is TrueCrypt of course.  It's discontinued, there are question marks over its actual security level, and it's open-source, which leaves one wondering whether it might just go ahead and destroy all your data mysteriously and irrecoverably due to some strange previously-unencountered bug (or worse yet a known bug that has been languishing in the support queue for years, as happens sometimes with open-source and even commercial products).

But, TrueCrypt appears to be the only strong contender.  After all, we need something cross-platform, and that alone rules out a bunch of options.  And whilst performance and reliability have to be assessed, we do know that TrueCrypt has zillions of users, so we take the punt that it'll do the job well - of course making regular VM backups just in case.

Next snag : Filesystem?  I end up opting for exFAT, because it is natively supported in read+write mode by both Windows and OS/X.

Score!  My VMs run fast, and yes, I can transfer the external SSD back & forth between Mac Mini and Surface Pro 2 and it all works!

At this point, I'm super-excited.

However, I'm bothered by something.

It seems that every time I build a VM on the Mac Mini, then run it on the SP2, then take it back to the Mac Mini, there is a strange 30 second delay at the very start of booting the VM.

I Google - no answers.

It's been frustrating me around a month now, but I finally found the answer.

It has nothing directly to do with whether the VM is in the "Shared Virtual Machines" vs "Virtual Machines" folder, and nothing directly to do with running the VM on the Windows host.

It seems to be wholly & solely the VM being on an exFAT volume.

I can take the VM that has the 30 second delay at the very start of the boot process, copy it to a native Mac partition, and it boots immediately without the 30 second delay.

I tried some configuration tweaks that seemed unlikely to help, and indeed they didn't help.

My conclusion?  Lovely conceptually as it is to be able to share VMs twixt Mac & Windows via this external SSD, it's proving all told a little on the painful side.  Not hugely painful, but having to connect the SSD, run TrueCrypt, mount the TrueCrypt volume, use VMs, unmount the TrueCrypt volume, unmount the SSD - that's a little tedious - and now add that there is an absolute waste of 30 seconds of your life at the very outset of every VM boot (and I tend to be starting & stopping VMs a lot throughout the day), and it gets a little frustrating.

The VMs once running run just fine, so it's clearly something VMware could fix.

But I found no-one else anywhere else mentioning the same problem, so I doubt it's even on VMware's radar.

I'll stick with the system for now - it does work - but I'm thinking of changing to a setup where both the Mac and the SP2 have a full copy of all VMs, on their native filesystems with their native full-disk-encryption technologies, and using any of the zillions of backup / file-replication utilities out there so that when I run the VM on one and shut it down, any changes get copied across to the other copy of the same VM.  If that works, then I'll have a truly blissful and hassle-free experience of using the same VMs on two different machines, one being an OS/X host and the other being a Windows host.

The big problem then will simply be storage space disparity.  I might end up paying the small fortune to get a 512GB Surface Pro 2 or 3, just so I can fit everything.  Or else I might use an external SSD just for the less-frequently-used VMs.  Or I might augment the SP2's storage with an external SSD encrypted with BitLocker and formatted with NTFS and used only by the SP2.

The short of it?  VMware Fusion runs VMs off exFAT partitions just fine, but for no apparent reason will waste 30 seconds of your life every time you boot a VM, at the very start of the boot process, before even the VMware Fusion logo pops up on the VM screen.  Please fix it, VMware!

P.S. The problem does not occur with VMware Workstation / Player - i.e. on the Windows host, the 30 second boot delay does not occur.  It is only a problem with VMware Fusion.

P.P.S. I'm using VMware Fusion 6 Professional (paid) and VMware Workstation 10 (trial), about to change to the latter being VMware Player Plus (using the VMware Player Plus license that comes free with VMware Fusion 6 Professional).