Hi EcoEric, and welcome to the VMware Communities!
We've identified two possible causes of this problem, which have been addressed in successive releases of VMware Fusion. The details are as follows:
- Fusion 3.0 and newer improves the way we handle a new class of OS kernel memory introduced in Mac OS X 10.5; if you are running Fusion 2.x on Mac OS X 10.5 or newer, you might hit this error intermittently until you upgrade to Fusion 3.0 or newer.
- Fusion 4.0 and newer addresses an issue where a host running the 32-bit kernel would sometimes fail to allocate a region of memory needed for the VM to run. This was more likely to happen if your host has many gigabytes of RAM (i.e. 8 GB or more), and if your host has been running for a while since its last restart, although neither of those conditions are strictly required. If you wish to continue running Fusion 3.x and are encountering this isue, you might be able to work around it by switching to the 64-bit kernel (assuming there are no other compatibility issues on your host preventing you from doing so); otherwise, usually rebooting the host will also return it to a state where virtual machines can be powered on again. (Yes, I also dislike being told to restart the host...)
Neither of these problems should affect Fusion 4.0 and newer.
It's entirely possible that there may be other causes of this problem, so if the above descriptions don't match your situation, please post back with some more detail about your host OS and the version of Fusion you're using. Include a vmware.log from inside the VM's ".vmwarevm" package if possible -- just attach it to your reply.
Cheers,
--
Darius
