

I have been experiencing a very similar bug, which is repeatable and 100% consistent. Same resultĪlso tested on a MBP with a good old fashioned Hard Drive as well as an SSD. I've tested this on a High Sierra host at 10.13 and 10.13.3 both with VMware 10.0.1 and 10.1.1. And as noted earlier, can be avoided by configuring the VM with 1 vCPU. The problem only happens when updating to 10.13.3 in the APFS case-insensitive VM. I've created four separate High Sierra (10.13) VMs It looks like the problem I'm seeing has something to do with non-case-sensitive APFS. In the mean time, I've done a bunch of additional testing. Note: I'm running on a late 2011 MBP tho. Interestingly, I do not see any kernel panics when running OSx VMs with 4 vCPUs (at least not the kernel panics as described in the linked thread). Looking at the thread you linked, it looks like VMware is able to recreate the kernel panic and is looking into it. Thanks Wil, perhaps the same underlying issue that causes the kernel panic is also at play here as well. Wondering if anyone else is seeing this? Thoughts anyone? This would seem to suggest some sort of race (or deadlock) condition in Apple's update logic for 10.13.3.

Good news - this is easily and 100% re-creatable. The symptoms are similar to those reported by cragsdale1 in this thread but without FileVault in the guest VM. If I configure the VM with 4 vCPU's, and nvram boot-args="-v", the restart will sometimes complete, but still sometimes hangs. If I configure the VM with 4 vCPU's the update installation process will hang (as described above). If I configure the VM with only 1 vCPU, the update installation completes successfully every time. I snapshot'd the VM before proceeding to the installation of the 10.13.3 update, so that I could run a number of different test permutations, reverting back to the snap shot between each test. To eliminate other variables (like 3rd party software, drivers, etc) I've created a new/fresh High Sierra 10.13 guest VM (Just an OS, no other software in the VM). The host OS shows that the VM is using 100% of one CPU core (apparently in a tight loop). At this point the restart process is hung (I've left it sit like this for many hours). Upon restarting, the progress bar advances, the VM reboots again, the progress bar advances again, and eventually the progress bar disappears and all I see is a dark screen with an white apple logo. the update downloads fine, and then the update's installation process initiates a reboot of the VM. Whilst updating a guest VM running High Sierra 10.13 to 10.13.3. I have High Sierra (10.13.3) host OS running Fusion 10.1.1 on a late 2011 MBP.
