I am running the latest version of Virtualbox on my Windows 8.1 desktop and I’ve noticed my network has been unavailable after the machine resumed from sleep mode. I found several people that claim the problem is with Virtualbox so I decided to switch to VMWare Player and see if that solved the problem. The VM I chose to use for the testing is an ArchLinux install. My Virtualbox VMs are located in the folder V:Virtualbox and my VMWare VMs are located in the folder V:VMWare.
Before I did anything, I copied the entire ArchLinux folder that contains the test VM in case something went wrong during the conversion — backups are always a good idea! 🙂
The first thing to do was to convert the Virtualbox VDI hard drives to VMWare’s VMDK format. Virtualbox has a utility that will convert the drive. I opened a Command Prompt and ran the following commands:
v: cd VirtualboxArchLinux "c:Program FilesOracleVirtualboxVBoxManage.exe" clonehd --format VMDK archlinux.vdi archlinux.vmdk md VMWareArchLinux move archlinux.vmdk VMWareArchLinux
I then created a new VMWare VM stored in V:VMWareArchLinux and attached the newly-cloned archlinux.vmdk as the drive. After booting the new VM, I performed the following commands in ArchLinux:
rmmod vboxguest vboxsf vboxvideo
sudo pacman -R virtualbox-guest-modules virtualbox-guest-utils
(also comment out "/usr/bin/VBoxClient-all" in .xinitrc if necessary)
sudo pacman -S open-vm-tools open-vm-tools-modules
(add KillSignal=SIGKILL to /usr/lib/systemd/system/vmtoolsd.service to fix a hang during service stop)
cat /proc/version > /etc/arch-release
systemctl start vmtoolsd
systemctl enable vmtoolsd
After performing these steps, ArchLinux is running normally in VMWare Player 5.
Oh, and uninstalling Virtualbox fixed my network problem after resuming from sleep. 🙂
Update: I’m still having a couple of issues with this VM after conversion. VMWare continually prompts me to install the vmtools (guess it doesn’t recognize the open-vm-tools package) and perhaps as a result the vmtools do not appear to be functioning properly. The screen is not resized correctly on boot and I am not sure the shared files function is working. So I still have work to do. 🙂
ArchMunky 