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For the last couple days I’ve had a problem with VMWare Workstation v.7.1.4 build-385536 where my left mouse click suddenly stopped working in my Windows 2008 guest VM.

I finally found the problem!

When dragging and dropping text inside the guest VM I was dragging outside the VMWare container. This is what caused the problem.

To fix it so that never happens again I’ve disabled the ability to Drag & Drop from the guest. You can set this in your virtual machine settings, under Options > “Guest Isolation”.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to disable time/clock synchronization in a VMware Fusion guest for the past few months, and I finally stumbled upon the answer! This will prevent the VMware Fusion guest from getting the correct time from the host OS on boot or restore.

The following lines need to be added to the .vmx file inside the virtual machine package:

tools.syncTime = "FALSE"
time.synchronize.continue = "FALSE"
time.synchronize.restore = "FALSE"
time.synchronize.resume.disk = "FALSE"
time.synchronize.shrink = "FALSE"
time.synchronize.tools.startup = "FALSE"

VMware KB #1189

If you are trying to figure out how to get your network working again after cloning a VMWare image from Ubuntu 8.04, I hope you find this post before you waste an hour trying to figure it out like I did.

After copying the VMWare files and launching the copied instance be sure to tell VMWare that you copied the image. This will generate a new MAC address for your cloned server. You will need to remove the networking udev rule though, in order for udev to figure out your new MAC address.

Just run this command:

sudo rm -rf /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules

Then

sudo reboot

If you keep a base install image on hand (highly recommended!), be sure to remove that file before you start to make copies from it. Then you won’t run into this problem again!