Fun with VMWare Fusion - Using SuperDuper! and Parallels to solve Fusion Issues

VMWare Fusion is my virtual hypervisor of choice.   You can leverage OS X's awesome ability to copy a running system with Carbon Copy Cloner and thus easily backup your virtual machines for a low cost.  For my situation, a K-8 school,  daily backups of the virtual machines are more than enough.  Data is stored on Google Drive for students so really I just have virtual machines that server out Munki, or profile manager or Deploy Studio and the like.


Carbon Copy Cloner won't copy the .vmdk of a virtual machine.
The specific error was "An error occurred while CCC was Reading data from the source   . . . {path to the virtual machine} Virtual Disk-000001.vmdk."   I had created a snapshot of this VM.   So, I thought I could merge the snapshots and clear out the problem.  No dice.  I couldn't even copy the file.  I did the usual, disk utility on the host machine and the VM and no issues.  I also ran a privilege repair.  Nothing was working.  

So, the clue that helped me figure this out was about a month ago I had converted a physical 10.6.8 OS X server I had setup to run Deploy Studio and Munki on.  I had backed up this system using SuperDuper! to an external hard drive.  I attached that hard drive to the VM host and then to a generic OS X VM I had setup.  Inside the VM I created another blank virtual disk and ran SuperDuper! and copied the physical backup to the new virtual disk inside the generic VM.  After cloning the drive, I changed the boot drive to my newly cloned virtual disk and success.

So,  with my current problem of the corrupted and uncopyable virtual disk I did a similar maneuver.   This time I created a new virtual disk inside this troublesome VM, cloned one virtual hard drive to another booted up to the new hard drive and success.  I could simply delete the old troublesome .vmdk file and now CCC could copy.


Fusion P2V Fails to Copy Windows Physical System

In this case,  I was trying to use Fusion 6 to copy a physical system to virtual system.  I kept getting network errors despite removing anti-virus, and turning off the Windows 7 firewall.   Parallels to the rescue.  I fired up Parallels and successfully copied over the Windows 7 physical computer to a Parallels virtual system.  I then copied over the Parallels VM over to my Fusion host.  From Fusion I chose File > Import and successfully imported the Parallels VM over to Fusion.


Conclusion
Don't be afraid to use other tools to solve your issues.  Remember,  even though you are working in a virtual environment.  tools like SuperDuper! still work inside a virtual system.  Or if one VM host software P2V tools don't work then try another VM host software to help solve your issues.