I have:
8 x Windows XP (32 bit) - in order to support different customer configurations.
1 x Debian Squeeze (64 bit) to support a couple of others
1 x Windows 7 (64 bit) - for my day to day work
I spend most of my time (8-16) hours a day in Windows 7 for my day to day work (emails, writing documents) and one of the Windows XP VM's for my current development.
I'll often switch back to OSX to play music in iTunes, and check my personal mail.
When a customer has a query, then I resume a Windows XP VM with their version of software, and then suspend again when I'm done.
I usually have 2-3 VM's running, but well within the memory and processing limits of the laptop - it all works lightening speed.
I've never had any problems like this in all the years I've been using VMware from Fusion 3 up to Fusion 5.0.1 .. except for the graphics issue with Fusion 5.0.2 when the Apple 10.8.2 update came out in November.
I stayed with 5.0.1 so that I could continue to keep Graphics acceleration switched on, until VMware support advised me that the graphics crash was fixed with OSX update 10.8.3.
It was all working fine until the evening I upgraded to 10.8.3, then my machine started hanging.
Before the upgrade, I shutdown all of the VM's.
On upgrading to OSX 10.8.3, and then 5.0.3, I set about ensuring all the VMware tools were up to date in all of the VM's.
I upgraded VMware tools by starting up 3 VM's, and then upgraded the tools in each one at a time (used the repair option)
Whilst the first VM was rebooting, I then moved onto the 2nd, and upgraded it.
Whilst the second was rebooting, I then moved onto the 3rd, and upgraded it.
When this batch were done, I suspened them all.
I then carried on like this for the others, in batches of three - some of the VM's had not been open for a week and also needed MS Windows updates too.
This was going quite well, until I got to about the 6th or 7th, and my machine completely froze up - it was going like lightening one minute, then completely froze up and I could not do anything - the iTunes song was still playing, but the keyboard and mouse were unresponsive and the VM I was in at the time was unresponsive and the clock in the task bar did not change.
I had to hard power off the machine after 20 minutes, check disks etc. but it all seemed fine so I carried on.
The next day, more freezes, and so it has continued - even with my normal routine of only having a couple open at a time.
On one occasion, I had only just started for the day, and it froze up simply sending emails from Windows 7.
I ran disk checks in all of the VM's - nothing reporting any problems.
When it got to the weekend, I decided to re-install OSX, the first time I migrated, had VMware issues, so the second time I erased and installed just VMware, and also Dropbox which has my software backed up. I also tried reverting to VMware 5.0.1 to see if that cured it ... no dice.
The third time, I erased and only installed VMware and nothing else.
Still clutching at straws here, but with Activity monitor running, I notice that my Virtual Memory (swap) size has grown to 2GB after resuming and suspending several VM's, and my free memory is drops to around 200MB - the usual memory level is 1GB free, and no Virtual memory in use.
I am not ruling out a hardware issue - it would be a very unfortunate and weird coincidence through, but not outside the bounds of possibility - I have run the Apple extensive hardware diagnostics for hours, and no issues were identified.
I'm hoping VMware support can make something of the logs I sent, It shows an NVIDIA Video issue at the exact time of the freeze each time:
NVDA(OpenGL): Channel exception! exception type = 0x1f = Fifo: MMU Error
Google turned up some other posts with this error, and they suggested that switching off "Automatic Graphics Switching" fixed it for them, I tried this yesterday, and at first it seemed to resolve the issue, however a few hours later it happened again.
So I'm baffled ... it's either a software glitch, or a hardware glitch .. but that does not really help.